The #1 growth stocks for 2026

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You can watch the video by clicking the player, listen to the podcast, or read an edited transcript below. These interviews were filmed on Tuesday, 9 December 2025.

Jensen Huang founded Nvidia in 1993. For much of its life, it was a good - but not great - company. A specialist chipmaker, a few near-death moments, and long stretches where the stock went nowhere.

Over the past decade, however, Nvidia has become the poster child for modern growth investing. What looks like an overnight success was, in reality, a 20-year build, powered by reinvestment, innovation, and patience. It is now the largest company on the planet, and a reminder that the best growth stories often take far longer to reveal themselves than markets expect.

That lesson extends well beyond a single stock. Over the past 15 years, growth has been the dominant equity style. 

Since the post-GFC reset, global growth stocks have outperformed value by around four-and-a-half percentage points per year, even though they had no right to do so. Growth was meant to fail. Instead, it adapted, overcoming inflation shocks, aggressive rate hikes, and repeated predictions of its demise. 

The winners of this era were not blue-sky ideas, but businesses that could reinvest capital at scale, defend margins, and compound earnings through wildly different market regimes. The growth decade did not end with cheap money. It evolved.

And if the past 15 years have taught us anything, it’s this: great growth stories are rarely obvious at the start.

With that in mind, we asked 10 of Australia’s sharpest investment minds, spanning ASX and global equities, to nominate their top growth pick for 2026 and beyond. 

Our featured fund managers include (in order of appearance):

• Anna Milne - Wilson Asset Management
• Ben Griffiths - Eley Griffiths Group
• Tim Carleton - Auscap Asset Management
• Arms Rosenberg - Minotaur Capital
• Steve Johnson - Forager Funds Management
• Joel Fleming - Yarra Capital Management
• Alan Pullen - Magellan Investment Partners
• Matthew Booker - Spheria Asset Management
• James Abela - Fidelity International
• Dr David Allen - Plato Investment Management (written responses only - see below)

Note: We thank the fund managers listed above for sharing their top ideas for 2026 in the spirit of the Outlook Series. All fund managers featured in this series manage diversified portfolios and do not invest solely in the stocks listed below. This list is not, nor is it intended to be, a set of recommendations. Please do your own research and seek advice from a professional before making any investment decisions of your own. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future returns.

Edited Transcript

#1 - HUB24 (ASX: HUB)

Anna Milne: One stock that I'm watching is HUB24, the ticker is H-U-B. HUB is investing while all its competitors are distracted. At a macro level, we are really positive on markets, and one way to play that theme is through these investment platforms. Naturally, they see earnings upside as markets are stronger, and they get bid up in market strength. 

Fundamentally, their competitors are distracted by First Guardian and Shield. Meanwhile, HUB is rolling out new products, which we believe will only further enhance their proposition versus their competitors. They continue to surprise to the upside on flows, FUM, and advisors, and we think the runway has further to go. It's not necessarily a cheap stock, but we have seen the recent pullback as an opportunity to build a position in this name.

#2 - Qoria (ASX: QOR)

Ben Griffiths: I'll nominate Qoria, which was formerly known as Family Zone. So this is not a resource name, but Qoria is a business that develops parental control software for internet access, essentially making the internet safe for kids. And Qoria is a business, a small-cap business that has been listed for a while. 60% of its business is centred on US activity and growing the business there. They've moved from 12 to 17% market share in that industry. 

The company is privately targeting 30-40% market share. We think they'll get there through a combination of new product releases and just greater penetration. They're among the top four players in the US. The important thing I like is that the business has been cashflow negative for a while, and we think '26 is the year that inflects and we start to see the business move to a cashflow neutral, and then ultimately a cashflow positive situation.

The balance sheet is not so pristine, but it's not so bad either. But we have a business that's very well managed with Tim Levy at the tiller. We have a business that's growing into a strong macro, it's growing market share, and we think will become cashflow positive, and that's extraordinarily advantageous for a group that's growing.

#3 - Nick Scali (ASX: NCK)

Tim Carleton: We're going to stick with a longtime favourite, that is Nick Scali. So both domestically and internationally, the opportunities are abundant for Nick Scali. So we're starting to see a pickup in the domestic furniture market. They have the opportunity to nearly double the domestic store network across their two brands, Nick Scali and Plush. And that's pretty exciting, but the real opportunity we think here is international expansion. They've gone into the UK market with an initial foray into 20 stores. They've got their margins much closer to the Australian margins in very, very quick time. So the only question really is whether the product resonates with the UK consumer. And the early signs there are very positive. 

So if they can have a compelling offering in the UK market, delivering similar sorts of margins to the Australian market, there's a real opportunity for them to probably double their earnings on the Australian business in the UK. And if they're successful in one international market, there's no reason why they shouldn't explore expanding into a few other international markets.

#4 - SK Hynix (KRX: 000660)

Armina Rosenberg: Our top growth idea is SK Hynix. So you're seeing memory emerge as a clear beneficiary of this whole AI supercycle, and I think we're still at the early innings of that. So even though DRAM prices are up something like 150% since their 2023 trough, and some components are actually up, I think three to four times over the last couple of months, we still think that the beneficiaries of that are going to be the three big players. So there's Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix. We like SK Hynix the most out of that. 

We think that we're still really early in that journey. So, what you've seen with us and our journey with AI, we can easily see us 1000x-ing our usage of AI over the next little bit. And if we're at the forefront of that cycle but we're early in the innings, we can see that coming through in things like the memory players like SK Hynix.

#5 - Plenti Group (ASX: PLT)

Steve Johnson: I think it's a year to be really careful about shooting for the stars. 2025's been great, especially at the smaller end of the market. There's been lots of profit. I think you want to be careful in 2026. Modest expectations are probably a good starting point. 

One sector and stock that I'm enthusiastic about is the non-bank lenders in Australia. They have risk. If we have a recession, it will be very bad for that sector. There are some really cheap stocks. One I like is Plenti. I think it's trading on a single-digit multiple of 2026 earnings. It's cheap, and it's growing really quickly.

#6 - Dimerix (ASX: DXB)

Joel Fleming: So it's been a little quiet for this one this year; high risk, high reward. It's a company called Dimerix. It's developing a drug for rare kidney disease. They're in the trial phase. So again, it is a high-risk part of the journey for them, but I really like the product, really like the team. 

The end market really needs something to help solve the issue here. And we think there's a lot of news flow, and this stock looks cheap and something that looks like it could have a really good run through 2026.

#7 - SAP (ETR: SAP)

Alan Pullen: So I'm going to stick to quality companies here when I answer this because we don't cover everything in the world. We're really looking at those high-quality companies that compound value over time. So there might be a more speculative, profitless tech that has good revenue, but when I think about those really high-quality, highly profitable companies in our universe, I think SAP really stands out. 

It's going from an on-premise transition from its enterprise resource planning software into the cloud. And when they do that transition, from on-premises to the cloud, they actually get a two to three times revenue uplift. And they're relatively early stage in this transition, so we've got a high level of visibility over the next few years of really, really strong revenue and earnings growth. So it's one that's really... It's not based on speculation. It's underpinned by really strong fundamentals.

#8 - Supply Network (ASX: SNL)

Matthew Booker: I've flogged this horse for a long time, but it's Supply Network. And we've talked about it many times in the past, but Supply Network is a bus and truck part distributor in Australia, and it's the number one player in the market. It supplies independent mechanics. It's got about 15% of the market, roughly. We think it can grow its share to higher levels. It's got scale, and that scale is its moat. It's got the range of parts, such that it can turn around the part quickly to an independent mechanic. And all they care about is speed and reliability, and that's what Supply Network provides. 

It's growing compound at 15% per annum at the top line, and the earnings growth has been higher. But they could actually gouge their customers if they wanted to and produce higher earnings growth, but they've actually just continued to reinvest in price, and in service, and speed and reliability. And so that's the sort of company that keeps building out its moat, and it owns the market at the end of the day.

#9 - HUB24 (ASX: HUB)

The number one stock for us is Hub24. It has good structural growth, it's winning market share, has a very high trust element to it, and it's a technology that is very complicated so when clients move into that ecosystem, they are likely to stay with it for a long time.

We believe the stickiness of that client base is quite strong, the stock has delivered growth and it's also a technology leader. All these things combined reinforce my view that Hub24 is a business that I am very keen to hold.

#10 - Macmahon Holdings (ASX: MAH)

What's your #1 growth stock pick for 2026?

Let us know in the comments section below.