3 No-Brainer Growth Stocks to Buy With $250 Right Now

Key Points

• Growth stocks have been the driving force behind the bull market, pushing valuations extremely high.

• These companies are all seeing strong customer retention rates driving steady revenue growth with potential operating leverage.

• Their stocks all offer great value when looking at their price-to-sales multiple.

• 10 stocks we like better than Datadog ›

The S&P 500 has continued its strong performance in 2025. The benchmark index is up 10% year to date as of this writing, following back-to-back gains in excess of 20% in 2023 and 2024. For many stocks, prices have climbed even faster than their earnings. In fact, the index now trades at a forward P/E above 22, significantly higher than its 30-year average of 17.

Growth stocks have been the biggest drivers of the S&P 500's performance over the last two and a half years. And many have earnings multiples well above the index average. But investors just getting started can still find great growth stocks to buy in the current market, even if they only have $250 to invest. The following three stocks are great opportunities for those looking for companies with excellent growth potential still trading at a fair price.

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1. Datadog

Datadog (NASDAQ: DDOG) provides real-time monitoring for IT systems with a particular focus on cloud computing. The company is in a great position to benefit from continued growth in AI spending in two ways.

First, as a leading cloud observability solution, it benefits from growing cloud spending for artificial intelligence (AI) training and inference. All three of the biggest public cloud platforms have noted that demand for their AI services continues to outpace their ability to supply it. Since Datadog uses consumption-based pricing, growing cloud spending also means growing revenue for Datadog.

Additionally, Datadog is releasing AI tools of its own. It's released several AI agents that autonomously investigate and fix code before bugs become an issue. It's also released its own large language models for use on its observability platform.

As a result, Datadog saw revenue growth accelerate to 28% last quarter. It also saw customers using more of its products with 52% using four or more and a 120% dollar-based net retention rate. On the other hand, heavy AI spending has weighed on profitability, with adjusted operating margin contracting 4 percentage points last quarter. But accelerating revenue growth more than justifies the upfront costs involved with capturing the massive opportunity with AI.

Shares of Datadog currently trade for around $128 as of this writing. That price is about 12 times sales expectations for the next year, which is appealing for a company growing revenue in the high-20% rate. While AI spending is weighing on profits, the path toward bigger profits is a lot easier with a much bigger revenue base. So, it's worth picking up a couple of shares with your $250 right now.

2. Atlassian

Atlassian (NASDAQ: TEAM) is an enterprise software provider focused on improving collaboration among workforces. Its flagship Jira and Confluence platforms boast over 300,000 customers, a growing number of which are large enterprises. Management said it doubled the number of deals worth more than $1 million last quarter.

Unlike most enterprise software companies, Atlassian doesn't have a big sales team driving revenue. Instead the focus is on improving the product and charging consumption-based pricing. As such, great product improvements will help drive revenue through more usage and higher pricing tiers. That's evident in Atlassian's move to include its AI capabilities in its premium and enterprise subscriptions. The newest effort is its AI agent Rovo, which can automate tasks across its software suite.

There's a clear demand for AI capabilities, with premium and enterprise recurring revenue growth of 40% year over year last quarter. That's well ahead of its overall revenue growth of 22%.

As Atlassian grows its revenue, it should see strong operating leverage thanks to its small sales team. Indeed, last quarter's adjusted operating margin of 24% increased 5 percentage points. Management expects fiscal 2026 operating margin in line with that number, expanding to 25% in 2027.

Despite strong sales growth, shares of Atlassian have fallen to about $167. That puts its price-to-sales multiple at just 8.4, and just 4.4 on a forward looking basis. That's an extremely attractive price as the company looks to have a lot of operating leverage and plenty of revenue growth ahead of it. The software stock could be a great buy with your $250 right now.

3. The Trade Desk

The Trade Desk (NASDAQ: TTD) has seen its stock take a wild ride over the last year. Shares fell earlier this year after operational challenges weighed on its fourth-quarter revenue. Specifically, the company was slow to transition customers to its new AI-powered Kokai ad-buying platform. As a result, the company missed its own revenue outlook.

The stock recovered, but it dropped again following the release of its second-quarter results. The culprit this time was its outlook for the third quarter coming in well below expectations. That said, the second-quarter results were strong, and investors may have been overreacting to management's muted outlook.

Management's forecast for just 14% revenue growth in the third quarter is a marked slowdown from the 19% growth it just posted. Part of the blame is on the political advertising landscape in a non-election year, which makes the comparable quarter tough. Management also blamed macroeconomic factors like tariffs, which could weigh on overall ad spending. Still, analysts were expecting stronger numbers after seeing positive outlooks from big advertising companies like Meta Platforms, Alphabet, and Amazon.

The Trade Desk separates itself from those so-called walled gardens by offering ad placement across a variety of sources ranging from connected TV to podcasts to retail sites and more. It gathers data from multiple partners, which helps improve its programmatic ad placements to ensure high-quality targeting and measurement. As a result, it's slowly gained share of digital ad spend over the last decade.

That trend doesn't seem to be slowing down despite the weak outlook for the third quarter. And with its Kokai transition finally on the right track (75% of customers were using it as of the end of the second quarter), it should be able to cater to more customers' needs. It may even push into the small and medium-sized business segment dominated by Meta, Alphabet, and Amazon. Moreover, as a dominant force in connected-TV advertising, The Trade Desk still has a lot to gain in more ad spend transitioning to streaming from linear television, catching up with actual view time.

With shares trading at just $54 after the post-earnings sell-off, shares look extremely attractive. Investors can pay less 8.5 times forward sales estimates for the company. It could be a nice addition to any portfolio of growth stocks.

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Annie Dean, a Vice President at Atlassian, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. Adam Levy has positions in Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta Platforms. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Amazon, Atlassian, Datadog, Meta Platforms, and The Trade Desk. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.