Due to the pullback in share prices during the final quarter of 2018, I think there a good number of shares trading at very attractive prices right now.
Five top shares that I think are in the buy zone are listed below. Here's why I would buy them in 2019:
Altium Limited (ASX: ALU)
Altium is an award-winning printed circuit board (PCB) design software provider and part of the WAAAX group of tech shares. I expect demand for its innovative and industry-leading PCB software will increase at a strong rate over the next decade thanks partly to the IoT boom. This should put the company in a great position to continue delivering strong earnings growth for some time to come, especially if its fledgling Octopart business wins a decent share of its significant addressable market.
Appen Ltd (ASX: APX)
Another member of the WAAAX group on my buy list is Appen. It is a provider of human annotated dataset development services to some of the world's biggest tech companies such as Microsoft and Facebook. As the company services machine learning and artificial intelligence markets which are expected to grow at a rapid rate over the next decade, I believe it is well placed to continue growing its earnings at an above-average rate for the foreseeable future. This could make its shares great value at 31x estimated FY 2019 earnings.
Aristocrat Leisure Limited (ASX: ALL)
Aristocrat Leisure is one of the world's leading gaming technology companies and could be a great option in 2019 following a selloff late last year. As well as having a strong core pokie machine business with some of the most in-demand machines in the world, over the last couple of years the company has made a splash into the fast-growing digital and social gaming markets. I feel things have started very well for Aristocrat Leisure and that it has built a solid foundation to support its future growth. At the last count the company had 8.1 million daily active users each generating 40 U.S. cents of revenue per day.
BHP Group Ltd (ASX: BHP)
If you're looking for exposure to the resources sector then I think BHP could be a great way to achieve this. Especially with trade war talks between the United States and China going well. If these two superpowers can come to an agreement, then I suspect that global economic growth will be robust again this year and lead to solid demand for the commodities that BHP produces. This could put it in a position to generate significant free cash flows from its world class operations in FY 2019.
National Australia Bank Ltd (ASX: NAB)
Whilst all the banks are arguably in the buy zone now, one of my preferred picks is currently National Australia Bank. This is due to its exposure to the small and medium sized lending market which this year is tipped to outperform home lending for the first time since 2011. Furthermore, with the Royal Commission final report due to be released in the coming weeks, I'm optimistic that investors will come flooding back if no nasty surprises are included in the report.
