9 top stocks to add to your portfolio now, according to market-beating strategists

US stocks have been stuck in quicksand ever since, as the S&P 500 hasn’t moved by 1% in a session after it broke through to 5,300 in mid-May. Such a breather is normal and arguably healthy, considering that the index just logged a typical year’s worth of gains in five months.

But investors aren’t wrong to feel antsy, even with tailwinds like higher earnings and falling inflation. Ed Clissold, the chief US strategist at Ned Davis Research, cited those catalysts as reasons to be bullish, but he’s still concerned about market breadth and near-term momentum. Strategist David Lundgren shared similar sentiment a few weeks earlier, just as stocks peaked.

9 stocks to put in your portfolio now

Although the market’s path forward is murky with the pivotal US election season coming up, investors shouldn’t fret.

A team of BMO strategists headlined by Belski unveiled their latest US strategy portfolios in a June 3 note. The Montreal-based firm has three such baskets — the US dividend growth, US SMID-cap, and US tactical equity portfolios — all of which had beaten their benchmarks in the last 12 months, as of May. However, only the latter two groups got new additions this month.

The US SMID-cap basket, which includes small and medium-sized companies, rose 2.7% in May, which was nearly 2 percentage points behind the S&P 1000 due to lackluster performance among stocks in the consumer discretionary, industrials, and information technology sectors. Still, the portfolio is beating its benchmark by 2.1% in 2024 and 4.3% in the last year.

For reference, the US tactical equity portfolio surged 4.9% last month, roughly in line with the S&P 500, and has outperformed by 0.9% this year and 2.8% in the last 12 months. Strong showings from mega-cap growth stocks like Alphabet, Microsoft, Netflix, and Nvidia lifted the basket, Belski noted, though its technology holdings still lagged behind the sector’s gain.

BMO refreshed its model portfolios to give stock-pickers an upper hand in the coming months.

Below are the nine new names in BMO’s US SMID-cap and US tactical equity model portfolios listed alphabetically, along with their tickers, market caps, groups, and BMO’s descriptions of their businesses and the reasoning behind adding each stock to the basket.