5 Top Stocks for October

The stock market has been rising all year, battling through another wave of the pandemic to carve out a new all-time high in the past month. The next few months may be messier, with labor shortages and supply chain issues causing serious problems for companies big and small.

For long-term investors more concerned about the next few years than the next few months, five of our Motley Fool contributors have honed in on five stocks capable of delivering solid returns. Here’s what you need to know about Digital Realty Trust (NYSE:DLR), SSR Mining (NASDAQ:SSRM), Intel (NASDAQ:INTC), Intuitive Surgical (NASDAQ:ISRG), and GXO Logistics (NYSE:GXO).  

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A different kind of tech stock

Matt Frankel, CFP (Digital Realty Trust): Real estate investment trust (REIT) Digital Realty Trust didn’t have a great September, with shares falling by more than 10% despite a lack of company-specific news. But I think this could be a great time to add shares of this long-term winner, which has delivered five times the total return of the S&P 500 since its 2004 IPO.

Digital Realty is a data center operator, and if you’re not familiar with the appellation, think of data centers as the physical “homes” of the internet. All of the data flowing around the cloud has to live somewhere, and that’s where these purpose-built facilities come in.

The need for secure and reliable places to house servers and networking equipment is likely to grow rapidly in the future. For example, the artificial intelligence (AI) market is expected to grow to about six times its current size by 2025, and autonomous vehicles, augmented reality, and other high-data devices are expected to grow at similar rates. And the gradual rollout of 5G technology in the United States and abroad will facilitate increasingly larger volumes of data flowing around the globe.

In the meantime, Digital Realty pays a 3.2% dividend yield, and the company has increased the payout at a 10% annualized rate since its IPO. There are few stocks in the market that offer this combination of income, growth, and reliability.

Add some luster to your portfolio 

Sean Williams (SSR Mining): With the market suddenly turbulent, the pandemic ongoing, and higher inflation rearing its head, I think October is the perfect month to consider an industry that’s home to a large number of deeply discounted value stocks. That’s why gold stock SSR Mining is my clear-cut top buy this month.

The SSR Mining buy thesis boils down to macroeconomic and company-specific factors. On a macro level, the tailwinds for physical gold are about as strong as they’ve ever been. Historically low bond yields are making sure that safe, inflation-topping income is hard to come by. Meanwhile, rapidly rising inflation threatens to eat away at the purchasing power of the dollar. This all points to investors seeking the safety of physical gold as a store of value. A higher spot price for gold will…