Earlier nosotros get to the stocks you lot're here for, let's acknowledge two caveats:

  1. Choosing the best stocks to buy today heavily depends on your personal financial situation. To go a feel for where yous stand, read our guide on how to invest in stocks. Information technology walks you through topics such as establishing an emergency fund, allocating assets, and when it makes sense to buy stocks.
  2. While I ensured some diverseness, the list beneath isn't meant to be a fully diversified portfolio. Instead, they're my highest-conviction stocks to outperform in 2022 and beyond. The all-time 1-step way to diversify your holdings is to build the cadre of your portfolio around something like the Vanguard Total World Stock Alphabetize Fund ETF (NYSEMKT:VT). That's the ultimate "stock" if you're going to buy just i investment and don't want to mess with picking among individual stocks. Y'all tin merely set it and forget it, knowing that you've got literally thousands of stocks from effectually the world working for you.

Now let'south get to my listing of the best 10 stocks to buy for 2022, from smallest market cap to largest, followed by the summary buy thesis for each one.

A stock chart showing upward price movement

Image source: Getty Images.

The top 10 stocks for 2022 (smallest to largest)

  1. Teladoc Health (NYSE:TDOC), $11 billion
  2. Pinterest (NYSE:PINS), $17 billion
  3. Etsy (NASDAQ:ETSY), $17 billion
  4. MercadoLibre (NASDAQ:MELI), $60 billion
  5. Sea Limited (NYSE:SE), $65 billion
  6. Block (NYSE:SQ), $74 billion
  7. Intuitive Surgical (NASDAQ:ISRG), $102 billion
  8. Walt Disney (NYSE:DIS), $253 billion
  9. Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRK.A)(NYSE: BRK.B), $784 billion
  10. Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), $ane.66 trillion

(Marketplace caps as of March 25, 2022, rounded to the nearest billion.)

Elevator pitches for each stock

At present that you've seen my top 10 list, you may exist wonderingwhy I picked each visitor. Here's a quick rundown of why I'yard such a fan of each of them as a long-term investment.

Teladoc Wellness

Already a growing forcefulness, telehealth got a big boost during the coronavirus pandemic. Afterward all, the barrier to a remote doctor's visit is much higher than buying your get-go ringlet of toilet paper on Amazon.

Teladoc is a leader in digital health. Its merger with chronic condition specialist Livongo (NASDAQ:LVGO) signals its intention to expand deep into the medical ecosystem. The company has done a great job of innovating and creating sustainable growth, and the manufacture is however in its relative infancy.

Pinterest

Pinterest is an haven of positivity in a social media landscape that'southward grown increasingly depressing and divisive. That partially flows from what Pinterest is well-nigh: ideas. People go to Pinterest to focus on things, not on other people. Whether it's building a dream deck, baking a kid'southward birthday cake, or updating your wardrobe, Pinterest gives people visual inspiration for the things they want to get done.

The knock against Pinterest, despite its solid customs and sales growth, has been a lack of Facebook (NASDAQ:FB)-level monetization. This is especially true internationally, which accounts for 80% of its user base. But that's what I love nigh Pinterest. It's got the platform and the audience, and it's actually easy to envision how seamless advertising, pb generation, and product placement could be when people are already there for suggestions.

Etsy

Etsy was growing nicely before the pandemic by connecting crafty makers with customers looking for something a scrap more than out of the ordinary than mainstream e-commerce fare. During the pandemic, all e-commerce was given a huge boost, but Etsy absolutely skyrocketed, growing at more than twice the rate of overall e-commerce. It certainly helped that Etsy was a natural fit when people wanted unique face up masks, but its growth has been impressive across all product categories.

Every bit y'all may observe throughout this list, powerful platforms get my attention. Make no mistake: Etsy is 1. Few e-commerce companies become head-to-head with Amazon and survive. Etsy not only did that when Amazon rolled out its ain handmade items platform; information technology won. Because of its platform and brand strength, Etsy's marketplace opportunity is in the hundreds of billions of dollars, and it has just started to scratch the surface.

MercadoLibre

MercadoLibre is oft referred to as the Amazon of Latin America and for good reason. The visitor operates an e-commerce market place that has a dominant presence in some of the well-nigh populous nations in the region, including Brazil and Argentina.

All the same, in that location's a lot more to MercadoLibre. It operates a fast-growing payments platform called Mercado Pago, a logistics service called Mercado Envios, a business lending platform, and more. MercadoLibre isn'tonly the Amazon of Latin America -- it's the Amazon, PayPal (NASDAQ:PYPL), Foursquare, Shopify (NYSE:SHOP), and more of Latin America all rolled into one and at a much earlier stage of growth.

Ocean Limited

Ocean Limited is rapidly growing into a powerhouse in Southeast Asia. The visitor operates the big Garena digital gaming platform, but the almost promising growth drivers are its Shopee e-commerce platform and Sea Money digital payments platform, both of which have been growing at triple-digit rates. With Garena, Shopee, and Sea Coin, Sea Limited has three fast-growing and loftier-potential businesses. Information technology is apace becoming a leader in all three, both in its home region every bit well as in other fundamental markets around the world.

Cake

Block, formerly known as Square, has evolved from a niche payment processing hardware company to a massive financial ecosystem for merchants and individuals. On the merchant side, Block has about $160 billion in annualized payment book flowing through its system, along with a suite of adjacent services for businesses. On the individual side, Block has the Greenbacks App, with tens of millions of active users and capabilities that include person-to-person coin transfers, direct deposits and debit cards, the ability to buy and sell stocks and Bitcoin (CRYPTO:BTC), and much more. Block likewise recently caused music app Tidal, as well as the Afterpay buy-now, pay-later platform. As its ecosystem evolves, the business organisation will merely get stronger.

Intuitive Surgical

Robot-assisted surgery beats the shaky hands of humans. That full general thesis hasn't inverse much from when I first bought Intuitive Surgical stock in 2005. The da Vinci surgical system is the clear market leader, and the "razors and blades" model helps it generate a recurring stream of revenue as its systems are used to perform procedures. Intuitive Surgical is dominant in its space, and it has lots of room to abound as its surgical systems increase in adoption and every bit the number of its supported procedures increases over time.

Disney

The House of Mouse is the all-conditions tires of a portfolio. The pandemic hurt its theme park and movie businesses but helped the Disney+ streaming service, which has grown into a powerhouse years sooner than Disney expected. In 2022, need for Disney's theme parks and movies is coming back stronger than ever. Disney+ had a "Wow!" beginning yr, and the company is rightly focusing on expanding it. In fact, Disney might be the ultimate combination of a reopening play and a pandemic-fueled growth business organisation. Its astonishing stable of intellectual property (Marvel/Star Wars/ESPN/Pixar/Disney) gives it a margin of safe that makes it perhaps the "safest" stock on this list. Notwithstanding, information technology has tremendous growth potential as the newer areas of its business concern evolve.

Berkshire Hathaway

While most of this list is made up of growth stocks, this is the relatively boring value choice of the agglomeration. Berkshire Hathaway owns a drove of most threescore subsidiary businesses, including household names such every bit GEICO, Duracell, and Dairy Queen, merely to proper name a few. Berkshire likewise owns a more than $300 billion portfolio of mutual stocks that includes a massive stake in Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), and it holds shares in dozens of other companies, many of which were hand-selected past legendary investor Warren Buffett himself.

The Warren Buffett bears volition say he has lost his fastball, but Berkshire continues to produce market-beating returns in most years despite its massive size. If Berkshire were a mutual fund, it would exist the largest actively managed mutual fund in the earth.

To exist sure, Buffett won't exist at the helm forever. Simply Berkshire is Buffett'due south legacy, and he'south been stress-proofing it for years to make sure information technology's in solid shape long after he's no longer running things. Showing his faith, he and partner Charlie Munger have been buying back shares at a historic clip. That'southward a practiced signal for the rest of usa.

Amazon

Amazon doesn't really need much of an lift pitch for virtually people. The company has a dominant pb in the U.S. east-commerce market, and its Amazon Web Services deject platform is besides a market leader.

Nevertheless, more growth potential exists than you might recall. We're a long way from maximizing east-commerce adoption; it notwithstanding accounts for less than 15% of all U.South. retail sales. The deject industry is relatively immature too. Plus, Amazon has a ton of potential in other areas such equally healthcare, grocery stores, neighborhood markets, and more than.

Final takeaways for using this stock listing

If you're starting on your investing journey (or if you desire a sanity check), please read through our how to invest in stocks guide. It walks through all the basics, from how to get started to how to determine your personal investing strategy to how much of your coin to invest in stocks.

While I'm bullish on each of these stocks and take given you a lilliputian information on each, use this list. If you're just getting started, you lot'll as well want to see the 15 all-time stocks for beginners.

Start with the stocks that speak to yous, and experience free to ignore the ones that don't.

Practiced luck and Fool on!

This commodity represents the stance of the writer, who may disagree with the "official" recommendation position of a Motley Fool premium advisory service. Nosotros're motley! Questioning an investing thesis -- fifty-fifty one of our own -- helps us all think critically about investing and brand decisions that help us get smarter, happier, and richer.