Investors have been grappling with volatility amid fears of artificial intelligence disruption in a range of sectors, but attractive opportunities abound if they can look beneath the surface.
Ignoring the ongoing noise, investors with a long-term horizon can track the recommendations of top Wall Street analysts, who take several aspects into account and conduct in-depth research before assigning a buy rating to a stock.
Here are three stocks favored by some of Wall Street’s top pros, according to TipRanks, a platform that ranks analysts based on their past performance.
Datadog
Artificial intelligence-powered observability and security platform Datadog (DDOG) is this week’s first pick. Following the company’s Investor Day event on Feb. 12, Baird analyst William Power reiterated a buy rating on Datadog stock with a price target of $180. The analyst stated that while Datadog didn’t provide any new long-term forecasts at the event, it continues to target an adjusted operating margin of over 25%, reflecting a balanced approach between investing for future growth and near-term profitability.
Power noted solid demand for Datadog’s existing products and growing opportunities in AI, logs, developer tools and security. He added that given Datadog’s notable advantage in contextual data compared to rivals, the company is well-positioned to help enterprises as AI is increasing complexity within IT stacks.
The five-star analyst believes that Datadog has the ability to address enterprises’ security needs, supported by its broad observability platform and significant data insights. Power highlighted that while the company currently has about 8,500 security customers, including 70% of customers with over $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), security makes up only 2% of total ARR from these large customers, reflecting that vast expansion opportunity.
“We remain positive on the company’s leadership position in the observability market, the continued success of its land and expand motion, and long-term opportunities across new products (especially security),” said Power.
Power ranks No. 459 among more than 12,100 analysts tracked by TipRanks. His ratings have been profitable 55% of the time, delivering an average return of 15.8%. See Datadog Ownership Structure on TipRanks.
Vertiv Holdings
AI infrastructure company Vertiv Holdings (VRT) provides power and cooling solutions to data centers. VRT recently rallied after reporting upbeat results for the fourth quarter of 2025, with organic orders surging 252%.
Citing solid order growth and insights from Vertiv’s 10-K filing, Bank of America analyst Andrew Obin reiterated a buy rating on VRT stock and raised his price target to $277 from $250.
Obin highlighted that the company expects the strong momentum in its orders to continue in 2026. “To grow on top of 2025’s $17.8bn in orders (+81% y/y organic) would be an impressive feat,” said the analyst.
He noted CEO Giordano Albertazzi’s commentary that the pipeline was not depleted even after many large orders in the fourth quarter of 2025. Obin expects Vertiv’s 2026 orders to grow by 5% to $18.6 billion. The analyst explained that even this modest year-over-year growth will result in significantly favorable backlog statistics. Specifically, a 5% order growth would add $5 billion to backlog (up 33% year over year). For Q1 2026, Obin projects $4.3 billion of orders (+52% year-over-year organic growth).
Among the key takeaways from the 10-K filing, Obin highlighted that aside from tariff and economic uncertainty, AI, and thermal product expansion, Vertiv mentioned three new trends: strengthening services capabilities, strategic deals with Nvidia (NVDA) and Caterpillar (CAT), and prefabricated product development.
Obin ranks No. 87 among more than 12,100 analysts tracked by TipRanks. His ratings have been profitable 70% of the time, delivering an average return of 19.2%. See Vertiv Holdings Statistics on TipRanks.
Arista Networks
Finally, we look at Arista Networks (ANET), which provides networking solutions to large AI and data center environments. The company impressed investors with market-beating Q4 results and issued strong guidance.
Following the decline in ANET stock in reaction to the announcement that Nvidia will supply Meta Platforms (META) GPUs, CPUs, and networking solutions, Needham analyst Ryan Koontz said that he expects the deal to have “little to no impact” on Arista’s solid supplier position with Meta. Koontz reiterated a buy rating on ANET stock with a price target of $185. It is worth noting that the analyst had recently raised his price target for Arista stock to $185 from $165.
Koontz highlighted that the Meta Platforms-Nvidia deal sparked concerns as Arista is a major networking supplier to the social media company. The analyst estimates that Meta accounted for 16% of Arista’s 2025 revenue. Based on several industry checks following the deal’s announcement, Koontz continues to view ANET as a “dominant” supplier to Meta Platforms for its AI back-end spine and scale-across applications.
“Our checks indicate that the bulk of NVDA networking sales to Meta have been and will continue to be NICs [network interface cards] that bridge NVDA xPUs to a first layer of Spectrum-X switches, which are backed by the ANET spine and scale-across networks,” noted Koontz.
The five-star analyst added that the announcement doesn’t reflect anything notably new in networking, and is in fact a follow-up to a similar announcement in October 2025 from the Open Compute Project (OCP) conference, when Nvidia announced that Meta would deploy Spectrum-X.
Koontz ranks No. 277 among more than 12,100 analysts tracked by TipRanks. His ratings have been profitable 51% of the time, delivering an average return of 24.7%. See Arista Networks Financials on TipRanks.
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