Buy Hold Sell: 4 under-the-radar ASX growth stocks for your portfolio

If you’ve ever watched a race, there’s usually someone trailing well behind the pack. The limelight belongs to the winners, of course, but there’s always a mix of second-hand embarrassment and sympathy for the poor sod trying and failing to catch up.

Growth investing can feel much the same. Miss the starting gun, and you may have already missed the early and most powerful part of the rally. 

In this episode, Anna Milne from Wilson Asset Management and Blake Henricks from Firetrail Investments explain how they identify early-stage growth opportunities and, more importantly, how they distinguish early-stage businesses with long growth runways from those that are simply cheap. 

A key insight they agree on is that successful early growth investing starts with a deep understanding of the business itself, built through direct engagement with the company, not just financial metrics. 

They each share two under-the-radar growth stocks they rate as buys, along with the investment thesis behind them. This is an all-buys episode, so keep your watchlist handy.

Please note this interview was filmed Wednesday 28th January, 2026.

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Edited Transcript

Chris Conway: Hello, and welcome to Livewire's Buy Hold Sell. My name is Chris Conway. To be a successful growth investor, sometimes you have to be early on the big growth stories. Because if you're jumping in when everyone else is, chances are you've missed the early part of the rally. So, which under-the-radar growth stocks are worth paying attention to right now? To help answer that question, I'm joined by Anna Milne from Wilson Asset Management and Blake Henricks from Firetrail Investments. 

How to identify a great growth story

Chris Conway: Before we get to the stocks, I just wanted to ask, being early is powerful, but it's also risky. So how, Anna, do you differentiate between those great growth stories versus a stock that's just cheap and not so good?

Anna Milne: It's quite hard to decide when something's early if it's in the ASX 200 already. It is quite an established company, generally. So sometimes, we see earnings growth not through being early, but actually earnings turnarounds. And an example of that could be an ASX 50 company that has been through a really tough time, whether it's matters in their control or outside their control. But if you can catch that inflexion point when things are beginning to recover, and if the market is pricing in a grey sky scenario into perpetuity, there can be a lot of alpha in that respect.

So we really like those turnaround stories as a matter of getting some earnings growth. So to do that, you meet the management team, you talk to customers, suppliers, get a few independent sources to verify whether things are turning around. But if you're too early, you might be catching a falling knife. If you're too late, you're too late.

Chris Conway: Yeah. Blake, what about you? How do you think about that being early versus buying something that you don't want to end up in the portfolio?

Blake Henricks: Oh, geez, that's the age-old question. I mean, how do you identify these stocks? That's what I always think about. Screening for valuation on early stage stocks, my view just doesn't work because it's too early. So instead, focus on reading, talking to people, understanding what the business is before I do anything about the numbers. Because as soon as you start looking into numbers, that's when you can start anchoring to next year's earnings. Whereas any good, being early stock, the real growth is going to happen in 10 years time. And so understanding the business rather than focusing too much on the numbers early on, I think, is really important.

Chris Conway: Yeah. So both of you, it seems like you've got to get out there, hit the bricks, talk to people, supply chains, competitors, all that sort of stuff, right?

Blake Henricks: Absolutely. And I think, people often ask, "Where do I look?" And it's like, well, there's just no one answer. If I said, "Oh, go to this website or talk to this person," it's just not. So activity is actually probably your best friend in terms of finding new ideas.

#1. PYC Therapeutics (ASX: PYC) 

Chris Conway: I've asked both guests to bring along two stocks that they think are a little bit under the radar or have strong prospective growth stories. Blake, I'll stay with you. What's the first one that you're going to pitch for us?

Blake Henricks: The first one's actually a biotech stock called PYC Therapeutics. Now, what PYC do is they target genetic diseases where there's just one single gene that's the problem. And so one really common example would be polycystic kidney disease. And so that's where it affects one in 1,000 people and the kidney ends up failing. And so what they do, they've worked on an RNA therapy, which became really popular through COVID. They've done tests on primates, which is monkeys, and it's worked really well. They're currently testing humans for safety, and that looks like it's going well. And we're going to get readouts in 2026 and 2027 on whether it's working in humans.

So if it does, I mean, to put this in context, the market cap's around a billion dollars. Just that kidney disease, we need to be getting annual revenue in terms of that one in 1,000 people talking about a 15 billion dollar market. Really exciting. It is risky. We are early. 

Chris Conway: Biotech always is risky, so that's okay.

Blake Henricks: Absolutely. But I think in terms of biotech, this is very low risk. It's a very focused management team who are saying single gene focus. They've done a lot of safety. They've done the primates. It looks pretty good to us. 

#2. Tuas (ASX: TUA) 

Chris Conway: PYC, that's a strong start. Anna, what's your first pick?

Anna Milne: My first pick is Tuas. The ticker is T-U-A. And I would say it's under the radar because it's not an Australian household name like Telstra or TPG Vodafone. And it actually spun out during the TPG Vodafone merger in 2020. So it has been around about five years on the market and it's a Singaporean challenger telco. It's gone from strength to strength over the last five years, but we think it's really getting its next leg of growth through its recent acquisition of M1. Now, M1 is a bit more of an incumbent, but often what works really well with the telco is if they have a broad strategy across business and consumer and are targeting the high end and the low end of the market. So we see them as really complementary strategies. We think the synergies can deliver beyond what they're promising the market. So the next catalyst for Tuas is the completion of that deal, and then we'll go from there.

#3. GemLife Communities Group (ASX: GLF) 

Chris Conway: So Tuas, for you, first pick, Anna. Blake, I'll come back to you. What's your next pick?

Blake Henricks: For us, it's GemLife. GLF is the ticker. It's a founder-led business that listed on the ASX in July of last year, so it's going to be pretty new to a lot of people. What they do is over 50s living. And the biggest thematic we believe in the Australian market over the next decade is going to be baby boomers moving into that retirement age. And one big unmet need is going to be over 50s living that you're proud to live in. This is really high-end fit outs. Gaggenau fridges. They're spending 20, 30 million dollars on clubhouses with pools. This is amazing stuff. So it really stands apart from other over 50s living. The second thing it does, it does its own construction. And what that's meant, if you look back through history, while most developers and contractors have been blowing out on costs, these guys have had very, very stable margins around that 50% on the build.

The third thing that makes this business unique and a really attractive investment opportunity is they continue to own the land in the long term. So if you go and move into a GemLife, you'll pay $700,000 for the house on top and you'll be paying about $200 a week on rent for the land. And so for GemLife today, they've got 1,800 houses already built out and collecting rent on the land. The great news is they've got a pop line of 10,000. This business is going to get a lot bigger over the next few years.

Chris Conway: I hope my mum doesn't mind me saying this, but she's looking at lifestyle communities. So GemLife, I'm going to take that home to her and she might have to check it out. 

Blake Henricks: She'll have to go to Queensland.

Chris Conway: All right, okay. Needs to come down to Victoria.

Blake Henricks: Where else would you want to be when you're over 50? 

Chris Conway: Where the sunshine is, exactly right.

Blake Henricks: I'm ready now.

#4. Netwealth (ASX: NWL) 

Chris Conway: Anna, bring us home. What's your second pick?

Anna Milne: My second pick is Netwealth. The ticker is NWL. Now they've been impacted in the last six months by the First Guardian/Shield fallout. That has now been resolved. There is a line in the sand that is concluded. What the recent quarterly showed to me is that the wheels haven't fallen off the stock. They still delivered really strong net flows. They're still at around 50% EBITDA margins and they're investing for growth as they should be. So, looking at the P/E point differential with Hub, we also really like Hub, but it's now at a 15 P/E point differential. That's the largest it's almost ever been. And we believe it's just not quite justified. They have this new HIN strategy coming through in the near term and we believe that it is in a winner takes all market. We believe Hub and Netwealth can both really succeed taking flows off the incumbents. So Netwealth.

Chris Conway: Very good. Ladies and gentlemen, there you have it. Something a little different in this episode. It was wall-to-wall buys, but some under-the-radar growth stocks as we plough ahead into 2026. Massive thank you to Blake and Anna for all three episodes in this series. If you liked this one, give it a like, and don't forget to follow our YouTube channel. We're adding lots of great content every single week.