MW Amazon, Palo Alto Networks - and 36 more hot stock picks from Deutsche Bank

By Emily Bary

Deutsche Bank's list of fourth-quarter high-conviction picks also includes 2025 laggards like Visa and standouts like Lam Research that could have more room to rally

Amazon's stock has struggled this year, but Deutsche Bank says concerns about market-share losses in the cloud seem overblown.

A new quarter means a new set of high-conviction stock picks from analysts at Deutsche Bank.

The bank put out its fourth-quarter "fresh money" list of top investment ideas on Wednesday, making the case for 38 stocks - 22 of which are new to the list this time around. Within the technology, media and telecommunications sectors, the Deutsche Bank analysts flagged nine particularly compelling opportunities, including four new ones.

They include Palo Alto Networks Inc. (PANW), which has lagged the S&P 500 SPX so far this year but offers the opportunity to outperform going forward, in the view of analyst Brad Zelnick, given the company's strong position in cybersecurity, ability to use artificial intelligence to its advantage and potential to capitalize on recently announced acquisitions.

The company's latest earnings, along with Deutsche Bank's recent survey work, "suggest that the underlying business is healthier than many investors expected following the announced acquisition of CyberArk." That $25 billion deal was announced in July and is expected to close in the second half of fiscal 2026.

See also: Why Palo Alto Networks plans to purchase CyberArk in a $25 billion deal

Visa Inc. (V) is another laggard that the analysts added to the list this quarter. "The market has seemingly overreacted to transient concerns around slowing cross-border growth and stablecoins, despite [Visa's] ability to meet and exceed earnings estimates," analyst Nate Svensson wrote.

The stock is up 10% so far this year, versus a 14% gain for the S&P 500, but Svensson sees room for the company to benefit from growth in personal-consumption expenditures and new payment flows, including for business-to-business transactions that weren't always an area served by Visa.

Lam Research Corp., meanwhile, has been a big winner so far this year, with its stock nearly doubling over the course of 2025 to date. But Melissa Weathers of Deutsche Bank added Lam to the "fresh money" list, citing the potential for further opportunity as memory-chip demand booms.

For chip-equipment players like Lam, trends in dynamic random-access memory had been "relatively solid," while trends in NAND, the other part of the memory market, were less upbeat.

More recently, though, "there have been several well-publicized developments in memory markets that we think bode well for an inflection in total memory spending," Weathers wrote, citing "a broader reversal of inventory/utilization headwinds," growing demand for end devices, and a tight DRAM market.

Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) is staying on the list after a disappointing, flattish run for its stock so far this year. One issue for the company has been that its cloud business isn't growing as quickly as those of its rivals, fueling fears that Amazon Web Services is losing market share and is not as well positioned for the AI economy as its competitors. Analyst Lee Horowitz isn't concerned.

"With generative AI accelerating the shift towards a digital economy unlocking infrastructure spend that we expect to measure in the trillions of dollars over time, and AWS still in pole position in terms of cloud scale to take advantage of this shift, current market-share concerns are likely to prove transitory," he wrote.

Don't miss: Amazon's stock is trading at a historic discount. Is it the bargain of the decade?

Meta Platforms Inc.'s stock (META) has had a better stretch than Amazon's, rising 23% over the course of the year so far. But Deutsche Bank's Ben Black cheered its "potential to materially outperform the broader market, and its internet peers," in the 12 months ahead, thanks to its ownership of the industry's "most durable advertising platform" as well as new opportunities that stem from foundation models.

Here's the full list of high-conviction picks. Deutsche Bank said the list has returned 241% since its inception in July 2017, versus a 213% gain for the S&P 500 over that span.

Consumer

   Company          Ticker 
   Coca Cola        KO 
   Hyatt Hotels     H 
   Life Time Group  LTH 
   Starbucks        SBUX 

Financials and fintech

   Company                       Ticker 
   American International Group  AIG 
   Charles Schwab                SCHW 
   S&P Global                    SPGI 
   Synchrony Financial           SYF 
   Webster Financial             WBS 
   Welltower                     WELL 
   Wells Fargo                   WFC 

Healthcare

   Company            Ticker 
   Acadia Healthcare  ACHC 
   Alkermes           ALKS 
   Danaher            DHR 
   Eli Lilly          LLY 
   McKesson           MCK 
   Penumbra           PEN 
   Repligen           RGEN 

Industrials

   Company             Ticker 
   Archer Aviation     ACHR 
   Alaska Air Group    ALK 
   Celanese            CE 
   Constellium         CSTM 
   Navigator Holdings  NVGS 
   nVent Electric      NVT 
   Pentair             PNR 
   Trex                TREX 
   Union Pacific       UNP 
   Visteon             VC 
   Woodward            WWD 

Tech, media and telecoms

   Company             Ticker 
   Amazon              AMZN 
   Cellebrite          CLBT 
   EchoStar            SATS 
   Lam Research        LRCX 
   Meta Platforms      META 
   New York Times      NYT 
   NXP Semiconductors  NXPI 
   Palo Alto Networks  PANW 
   Visa                V 

-Emily Bary

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October 01, 2025 15:18 ET (19:18 GMT)

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