We recently published a list of 10 Best Stocks to Buy for High Returns in 2025. In this article, we are going to take a look at where Alibaba Group Holding Limited (NYSE:BABA) stands against other best stocks to buy for high returns in 2025.
Market Outlook 2025
On December 17, 2024, J.P. Morgan released its market outlook 2025. The report expects the global economy to continue growing at a robust rate, however a sharp slowdown in China is expected. Regarding the equity market, the firm anticipates depressing trends across stocks, sectors, and themes. Analysts at the firm estimate the S&P 500 to be around 6,500 in 2025 with earnings per share of $270. The head of Global Market Research, Hussain Malik noted that the policies of the United States regarding trade, immigration, and regulatory policy will play a critical role in defining the year’s outcome for the country and globally.
The report further elaborated on its anticipation of a depressed stock market by highlighting de-coupling central bank policies, uneven progress in disinflation, and ongoing technological innovation. Moreover, increased geopolitical tensions are also likely to add unusual complexity to the global stock market. Despite all this, the firm has bright expectations for the United States. It believes that the country will remain a key driver of growth due to factors such as an expanding business cycle, a robust labor market, increased capital spending related to AI, and active capital markets. On the other hand, Europe is expected to grapple with structural challenges, while emerging markets may face headwinds from persistent high interest rates, a strong US dollar, and trade policy issues.
Lakos-Bujas, head of Global Markets Strategy at J.P. Morgan warned that a key risk to their base case involves disinflation stalling or reversing, which could prompt the Federal Reserve to consider interest rate hikes later in 2025 or early 2026. Such developments would necessitate a reassessment of their market outlook.
Our Methodology
To curate the list of the 10 best stocks to buy for high returns in 2025, we used Insider Monkey’s third-quarter hedge funds database. We checked the 25 most widely held stocks by hedge funds for 10-year growth rates from Seeking Alpha and ranked these stocks in ascending order of the number of hedge funds.
Why do we care about what hedge funds do? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter’s strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 275% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 150 percentage points (see more details here).
An e-commerce platform displaying a wide range of products to customers online.
Alibaba Group Holding Limited (NYSE:BABA)
10-Year Revenue Growth: 31.26%
Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 115
Alibaba Group Holding Limited (NYSE:BABA) is the largest Chinese multinational e-commerce company that also focuses on emerging technologies including artificial intelligence and cloud computing. The company currently owns around 46% market share of the Chinese e-commerce industry.
The company is strategically positioned to benefit from the opportunities presented by the rise in demand for artificial intelligence. Within its Cloud segment, the company unveiled an expanded suite of large language models (LLMs) under its Qwen family, including the Qwen 2.5 series. These models range from 7 billion to 72 billion parameters and are now accessible through APIs on the Model Studio platform, aimed at empowering global developers to create innovative AI applications more efficiently.
The cloud segment of Alibaba Group Holding Limited (NYSE:BABA), Alibaba Cloud, reported a 7% revenue increase during the fiscal second quarter of 2025. The growth was driven by double-digit growth in public cloud services. Notably, AI-related products within this segment showed remarkable performance, maintaining triple-digit growth for five consecutive quarters.
On January 21, Joyce Ju, analyst at BofA raised the price target for the stock to $117 from the previous target of $112. The analyst kept a Buy rating on the stock. The firm believes that the company will report 9% year-over-year during the fiscal third quarter of 2025, surpassing Street’s expectation by 2%. Alibaba Group Holding Limited (NYSE:BABA) ranks as the 9th best stock to buy for high returns in 2025.
Conventum – Alluvium Global Fund stated the following regarding Alibaba Group Holding Limited (NYSE:BABA) in its Q3 2024 investor letter:
“On 24 September the People’s Bank of China unveiled a massive three part stimulus package involving: (1) slashing the amount of cash banks need to hold in reserve and lowering the main policy interest rate; (2) cutting mortgage rates on existing home loans by 0.5% and reducing down payment requirements for second homes from 25% to 15%; and (3) supporting equity markets by a USD 114b lending pool to encourage companies to buy back shares and non-bank financial institutions to buy local equities (which may be expanded by the same amount two more times)5 . We are flabbergasted. But we shouldn’t be. After all, these types of arrangements have been all too common over the last 15 years. The local equity markets responded with gusto, and for the last week of the quarter the CSI 300 Index (Shanghai and Shenzen listed companies) was up 25.1%. Alibaba Group Holding Limited (NYSE:BABA) was not lost in all this, and returned 26.8% over that one week period. But Alibaba had already performed well so during the whole September quarter it was up a staggering 56.0%. As a result, Alibaba is no longer the cheap stock it once was. It now trades at a premium to our valuation – a valuation which admittedly had been progressively reduced over our holding period as a result of deteriorating business fundamentals. As a result of Alibaba’s significant outperformance, by the end of the quarter it had reached 3.7% of the Fund. We are weighing up our options here, considering the relative risk.”
Overall, BABA ranks 9th on our list of best stocks to buy for high returns in 2025. While we acknowledge the potential of BABA to grow, our conviction lies in the belief that AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and doing so within a shorter time frame. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than BABA but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.
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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.