10 Shares For Guaranteed Excitement

When I was young, back in prehistory, a DJ named Alan Freeman practically invented a pop phenomenon known as the Top 20, the 20 best-selling songs in the UK market. Performers and publishers were desperate to get their songs into this list because it guaranteed plenty of radio plays, more sales, appearances on shows like Top of the Pops, and plays on the even more ancient Juke Box Jury hosted by David Jacobs.

Even better than the Top 20 was the Top 10, which conferred almost instant fame on singers and groups. I was about to say – ‘so how’s about it guys and girls’, when I realised that was a catch phrase of a man who has rightly been airbrushed from the historical records for his monstrous behaviour.

So instead it is going to be ‘not ‘arf, pop pickers’ from those distant, innocent days, when boys were boys and girls were girls (birds, tail, talent, whatever) and the latter knew that their job in life was to enchant and captivate the boys. All other achievements came a distant second to this critical role, which added greatly to the happiness of nations or maybe not if you ask my daughters.

Fortunately, they long ago learned to stop reeling in shock at their outrageously politically incorrect father. Even so, they demanded an advance look at the eulogy I delivered for my gay elder brother to a mostly gay and impressively large audience at his funeral. This was not granted and was unnecessary since I have no problem with people being gay and was on excellent terms with my brother’s partners and many friends, which is not to say that I did not elicit a few gasps from my audience.

So let’s start thinking about a top 10 stocks for investors. Like with pop songs and such camp extravaganzas as the Eurovision Song Contest, what a weird thing that is, everyone who takes an interest will have a different selection and maybe different criteria for making their choices. Since the Eurovision songs seem to be universally awful, my criterion would probably be to rate the female singers, and maybe the boys too, on some prehistoric characteristic such as sex appeal.

My criterion for stocks is simple. I choose stocks based entirely on how exciting they are. They have to be 3G (great story, great growth, great chart) or they don’t make the short list, but after that, it is all about excitement.

Most businesses are not exciting. It amazes me that they attract any investors at all. Shares like Barclays, Marks & Spencer, Rio Tinto and other UK blue chips. They are often staples of institutional portfolios, but so BORING! Shares in Barclays and Marks & Spencer have been rising recently, but they have tracked sideways for years, even decades and would need an incredible makeover to become exciting.

Institutions and, to some extent, most analysts, though not Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities, definitely not him, tend to be obsessed with value. This is an almost Platonic concept. Greek philosopher, Plato, who taught Aristotle, had this weird idea that there was a cave somewhere which contained perfect examples of everything (I am a bit out of my pay grade here, but you will get the rough idea) and what we saw in the world was imperfect copies.

This led directly to the Christian idea of the incorruptible soul. When you had your wicked way with the girl who lived upstairs, it was your carnal body that did this while your soul reeled in horror and eagerly awaited the day when it could shuffle off this mortal coil and start the important and eternal job of singing hosannas.

Value is a bit like the soul. In the eyes of these institutions and analysts, the key thing was to capture value with your investing. Ideally, you bought shares below their true value and considered discarding them when they rose above this notional figure.

Exciting stocks are almost invariably unappealing on value grounds. There are various reasons for this. Retail investors love a good story, don’t know how to calculate value, and might not care even if they did. Much of the value of exciting stocks lies in an unpredictable future, so rapidly enters how long is a piece of string territory. Some institutions have to buy because they are index trackers, so they don’t do any analysis at all.

Lastly, there is the Bitcoin effect. Bitcoin has been the greatest investment of the past decade or so, and is impossible to value except by such mysterious benchmarks as suggesting that the value of all the Bitcoins in the world should be something like the value of all the gold in the world. Gold is equally hard to value.

A key characteristic of an exciting share is that it is hard to value. So I don’t try. I accept that I have no idea what the correct value is for the kind of shares, in fast-growing businesses, that I like.

Take one of the shares on my list, Dave Inc. Some 150 million Americans live from paycheck to paycheck, so they frequently have liquidity issues, even just to buy groceries. Banking fees are far too high to consider such modest loans, but Dave can help. Unlike traditional banks with their massive infrastructure and traditional ways of doing things, Dave has no infrastructure. It is an app, and the business has 274 employees. Barclays has between 80,000 and 90,000 employees, and the business mainly exists to pay their salaries and pensions.

Barclays and other traditional banks cannot help everyday Americans with their urgent need for $500 between paychecks because they would have to charge high interest, arrangement fees and, who knows, maybe even early repayment fees. Doing business with traditional banks and other lending institutions is a nightmare because they have so many hidden charges, they have to operate with high interest rate margins, and they charge huge spreads on things like foreign exchange.

Dave can lend you $500 instantly and very cost-effectively, and once it has done that and you have downloaded the app, you are a customer, and it can start to do other things for you, still very cost-effectively. It is hard for Barclays to steal a customer from another bank because they are all so similar. They advertise, but the ads are all waffle, showing happy families, dogs, galloping horses or whatever.

Dave Inc., by contrast, can do some of the things banks do or, in the case of $500 loans, cannot do much more cost-effectively and in a way that resonates with a younger, tech-savvy generation of customers. The CEO of Dave Inc., Jason Wilks, co-founded the business, owns a significant chunk of it, is still only 39 years old, and became a multimillionaire in his 20s when he sold an earlier business before starting Dave.

Dave has 12.4 million members using its app, which is impressive for a business which has existed for less than 10 years. It reckons its total addressable market in the USA is 180m members, and unlike its traditional banking rivals, it has an impressive offer to make to these people, which is why it is growing so fast.

It has at least two ways of growing, which could make Dave Inc. a much larger business than it is currently. It can sign up more members to its app, and it can sell those members more services, using its low-cost structure to offer the services of traditional banks more cost-effectively.

I expect, by this time, you are wondering why anyone would invest in Barclays when they could invest in Dave. This is what I think, but there are some issues with investing in Dave. It is vulnerable to competition from other start-ups. It can face unfair competition from traditional banks trying to put it out of business. Traditional banks are battle hardened by former recessions and periods of rising interest rates and know how to survive, may even be too big to fail. They will have stronger balance sheets and proceed more cautiously.

An investment in Dave Inc. is a high-risk, high-reward choice but unquestionably much more exciting. Just look at what the shares have done since the IPO. What on earth is the right price for a share as volatile as this? I have no idea, hence my preference for a staggered programme of purchases to help ensure that you invest at a sensible price.

What is undeniable about Dave Inc. is that it is a most impressive business.

Building on the success of last year’s results, we are pleased to report another record-setting first quarter, which outperformed expectations across key areas of our business. Top line growth accelerated on a year-over-year basis to its highest level since 2021, thanks in large part to the strong double-digit gains in ARPU [average revenue per user] and monthly transacting members. Adjusted EBITDA growth accelerated 235% to $44.2 million, representing a year-over-year increase of $31 million, which is the largest dollar increase in our company’s history. This increase is mostly due to the operating leverage we continue to achieve on our fixed cost base as well as the variable margin expansion we continue to generate from cash AI credit performance improvements. Given our results and the momentum we have in our business, we are raising our full year 2025 guidance for both revenue and adjusted EBITDA. This is the seventh consecutive quarter we have either raised or exceeded our guidance. Before turning to our strategic growth pillars, I want to provide an update on our recent transition to the new fee structure for ExtraCash. As a reminder, on February 19, we fully transitioned to a new fee structure consisting of a flat 5% fee on all ExtraCash transactions with a $5 minimum and a $15 cap, removing optional tips as well as additional transfer fees to Dave checking. Consistent with the testing we performed at the end of last year and into early this year, results have been better than expected. With this change, we have unlocked enhanced member lifetime value through improvements in conversion, retention and monetization among new and existing members. Approximately 60% of total originations were on the new fee model in Q1, so we will receive the full benefit of the change in Q2 onwards. Turning now to our three strategic growth pillars, efficient member acquisition, enhanced member engagement through ExtraCash and deepening relationships via the Dave Card.

Starting with our first strategic growth pillar of efficient member acquisition. We continue to efficiently acquire members at scale, reflecting the power of our credit-first value proposition and its synergies with our banking product suite. In Q1, total members grew 15% year-over-year, ending the first quarter at 12.4 million members.

Our second strategic pillar centers around continuing to strengthen engagement with our members through credit. ExtraCash remains the key entry point for building long-term relationships with our members by addressing what is typically their primary need, short-term liquidity for gas, groceries and bills. Our monthly transacting member base continues to grow with MTMs [monthly transacting members] up 13% year-over-year and 3% sequentially to a record 2.5 million. This growth was favorably impacted by higher new member conversion and dormant member reactivation in addition to continued strength in member retention. We saw strong engagement with ExtraCash originations exceeding $1.5 billion, representing an increase of 46% year-over-year and 3% sequentially. We believe this sustained growth, particularly during a seasonally softer quarter, is a testament to the effectiveness of our Cash AI underwriting engine and new fee model, both of which allow us to more profitably underwrite larger numbers of Dave members for higher ExtraCash approval amounts. The average size of an ExtraCash origination in Q1 expanded 21% year-over-year to $192.

Jason Wilks, CEO and co-founder, Dave Inc., Q1 2025, 8 May 2025

The bottom line is that Dave Inc. is an exciting, hard-to-value investment, a bit like Bitcoin, ideal for an investor ready to build a position over time. (LTV = long term value; CAC = customer acquisition cost)

The others shares in my top 10 have similar investment characteristics, exciting but hard to value, and operate in different areas of the US and global economy. The key to success is to acquire your shares at a sensible price over time and hope that the business delivers on its promise. Diligent readers of Quentinvest are unlikely to be surprised by my selection.

Share Recommendations

Palantir. PLTR

Nvidia. NVDA

Microstrategy. (Strategy) MSTR

Sezzle SEZL

Dave Inc. DAVE

Coreweave. CRWV

Spotify. SPOT

Netflix NFLX

Microsoft. MSFT

Carvana CVNA

Strategy – Buy These Shares For An Exciting Portfolio

The shares are in no particular order, although when I think of exciting, hard-to-value shares, Palantir does instantly spring into my mind. It is almost the epitome of such a share to the extent that the analyst community and most institutions throw up their hands in despair when confronted with the shares.

They may be right about the over-demanding valuation, but that should not be a problem for an investor ready to acquire their holding over a period. That is why my share recommendations come without prices. The name is what I give you; the price you pay is up to you, though I am a great believer in making a start regardless of price.

If you are a leveraged investor like me, you may only be able to buy at rising prices. That is still a good way of acquiring a holding at below the latest price. I am endeavouring to control my risk by buying a fixed amount of shares (the same amount every time, so a falling percentage of my total stake) on 10% increments in the price. In this way, my leverage should fall over time while allowing me to build a worthwhile holding.

One of the advantages of holding a portfolio solely consisting of shares in exciting companies is that there is always plenty going on to keep you interested, even on the edge of your seat. No way will I ever accept boring shares as investments, however cheap they might seem to be. I want action, the more the better and hopefully profitable action.

There will be thrills and spills along the way, but that is almost the point. Michael Saylor, executive chairman and founder of Microstrategy/ Strategy, seems to be convinced that he is onto a massive winner with his nearly $60bn bet on Bitcoin. Does he ever have doubts? I have no idea, but even if he does, I doubt that he would change his approach. He is a man who likes excitement, and he is getting that in spades.