As the trading year winds to a close, investors should keep an eye on some stocks that may be due for big gains in 2025, according to investment bank William Blair. There are only four full trading days left in 2024, which has already been a strong year for stocks. This month alone has marked fresh highs for all three major averages. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite is the outperformer of the three in 2024, rising about 33%. That is followed by the S & P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average , in that order. The broad market index has advanced around 26% in 2024, and the blue-chip Dow has gained more than 14% during the period. Heading into the new year, William Blair has highlighted several key stock ideas in various sectors. Below are some of the firm’s top picks. Broadcom has been on a tear this month, with the stock surging about 47% in December. Those gains bring its year-to-date advance to 114%. Earlier this month, the chipmaker topped $1 trillion in market cap for the first time on the heels of the company’s fourth-quarter adjusted earnings beating expectations and CEO Hock Tan revealing that Broadcom is developing custom artificial intelligence chips with three large cloud customers. With that, William Blair, which has an outperform rating on the name, expects even more growth ahead, anticipating “steady growth” with Broadcom’s existing partnerships as well as additional revenue from new customers such as ByteDance, OpenAI and Apple. “We see incremental room for expanding margins in 2025 as the company continues with its VMware integration and scales its custom chip business,” the firm wrote in a recent note. In the pet space, Chewy has also solidly outperformed the broader market this year, jumping more than 48% year to date. That rally could continue into 2025, as William Blair thinks a “modestly improving” industry backdrop could serve as a tailwind for shares. “We see notable upside still into 2025 stemming from an industry recovery … and ongoing normalization of online migration, both of which are still in early innings,” the firm wrote. “As online migration normalizes, we believe Chewy’s active customer growth will accelerate.” Among small-cap names, shares of clinical-stage biotechnology company Neurogene have risen 16% in 2024 and could be poised for growth in particular. Notably, William Blair thinks it is set to undergo two “significant value-creating events” next year centered around its NGN-401 gene therapy for Rett syndrome, a neurodevelopmental disorder. On that front, Neurogene is planning to disclose its registrational trial design for NGN-401 in the first half of the year and present more clinical data in the second half, both of which William Blair thinks will drive shares higher. This comes as the treatment was also selected by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration earlier this year for its Support for clinical Trials Advancing Rare disease Therapeutics (START) program, a move the firm thinks is “underappreciated” by Wall Street. “We look forward to updates on NGN-401’s registrational pathway, including endpoint selection, in the first half of 2025 and believe a streamlined clinical development pathway could be a major catalyst for the stock,” the firm wrote. Other names that made William Blair’s top picks list for 2025 include online used-car retailer Carvana and biopharmaceutical company Viking Therapeutics . Those stocks have already had massive runs this year, surging more than 322% and more than 126%, respectively.
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