1 Growth Stock, 1 Value Stock, and 1 Cryptocurrency to Buy for 2022

We’re just two trading weeks into the new year and already we’ve seen intense U.S. stock market and crypto market volatility. At the time of this writing, the Nasdaq Composite is already down over 5% so far this year. 

Investors trying to get their bearings after the stock market doubled over the last three years have come to the right place. Instead of diving all into one category, a basket of stocks including Adobe (NASDAQ:ADBE), Starbucks (NASDAQ:SBUX), and Ethereum (CRYPTO:ETH) offers a balance of growth, value, and income. Here’s why this group has long-term potential.

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Adobe: A wide moat

The best growth stocks aren’t the fastest growers, but, rather, are the companies that have industry-leading positions in exciting marketplaces, offer strong profit, and generate consistent positive free cash flow. If the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that the market favors this balanced level of growth at a reasonable price over growth at all costs. And few companies do it better than Adobe.

Year after year, Adobe stock produces excellent returns not because it posts rapid revenue growth, but because it pairs moderate revenue growth with increasing profitability. Adobe is a linchpin in the creative software industry and was a pioneer in transitioning toward software as a service. Today, its creative cloud, document cloud, and experience cloud segments generate stable growth and profits even during difficult economic times simply because Adobe is truly a staple of the digital age.

A few decades ago, discussions of recession resilience were usually reserved for consumer staple companies like Procter & Gamble that make products people need no matter how the economy is doing. Today, one could argue that companies like Adobe are digital staples, or enterprise staples because their solutions are needed to conduct business. Given its massive moat, improved profitability, and the fact that it’s down 26% from its 52-week high, Adobe stands out as a solid all-around growth stock to buy in 2022 and hold forever.

Starbucks: A modern-day value stock

Starbucks has transitioned from a growth stock to a value and dividend stock that could be a foundational holding in virtually any portfolio. The traditional framework of value investing developed by Benjamin Graham and adopted and modernized by investors like Warren Buffett, Mohnish Pabrai, and Guy Spier involves stripping down a company’s book value, earnings, and other metrics to see if its stock is trading at a discount relative to this intrinsic value. Typically, these companies were unknown names in cyclical or unattractive industries. But today, high-frequency trading, sophisticated modeling, and access to data have reduced the effectiveness for a retail investor to use this old style of arbitrage value investing.

Investors could argue that today’s value stocks are companies with fair price-to-earnings, price-to-free-cash-flow,…