Forget SpaceX Stock: Two Profitable Growth Picks, Amazon and TJX, Investors May Want to Buy Instead

Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the Elon Musk-led company commonly known as SpaceX, has dominated headlines and investor attention since going public in June, but the rocket maker's rich valuation and money-losing balance sheet are prompting some market watchers to point investors toward more established, profitable alternatives instead.

SpaceX priced its initial public offering at $135 per share in June, in what was widely described as the largest IPO ever completed. Shares opened at $150 on their first day of trading, an 11% jump from the offering price, and finished that session up nearly 20%. Wedbush analyst Dan Ives called the listing an important moment for the broader technology sector, saying the AI revolution and growing demand for data take this next step forward with SpaceX going public.

A Volatile Ride Since Debut

The stock's performance since its debut has been anything but steady. Shares reached an all-time high of $225.64 in mid-June before falling to a low of $107.01 by late July, according to trading data. As of Wednesday, SPCX traded around $125, with a 52-week range spanning from roughly $105 to $226, reflecting the kind of dramatic swings that have defined the stock's short public trading history. Howard Chan, founder and chief executive of Kurv Investment Management, said at the time of the IPO that the stock was bound to be volatile, adding that investors might be better served waiting for the equity price to settle before taking a position.

That volatility has persisted into recent trading sessions. SpaceX's stock dropped following its first earnings report as a public company this week, with investors reacting to soaring costs tied to artificial intelligence investment even as the company posted a significant revenue beat. The company has said it expects to reach $100 billion in annual recurring revenue by the end of this year and sees a non-zero chance of reaching $1 trillion in revenue by 2029, ambitious targets that have nonetheless failed to fully offset investor concerns about near-term profitability.

Beyond the headline volatility, analysts have also flagged the complexity of SpaceX as an investment. The company's business now spans rocket launches, the Starlink broadband satellite network, a social media platform, and artificial intelligence operations through its Grok and xAI-related businesses, a sprawling structure that some market watchers say makes the company difficult to analyze using traditional valuation methods. SpaceX remains unprofitable, reporting a net loss of $4.28 billion in its most recent quarter.

Amazon Offers Cloud Computing Strength

Against that backdrop, some investors have pointed to Amazon.com as a more grounded growth alternative. While Amazon's online retail business and devices such as Alexa remain the company's most visible products, its fastest-growing and most profitable division is Amazon Web Services, the company's cloud-computing arm, which now accounts for the majority of Amazon's overall profit.

AWS continues to post rapid sales and profit growth, a trend that has accelerated further amid rising enterprise adoption of generative artificial intelligence, which requires substantial data center capacity. Amazon's scale gives AWS a meaningful competitive advantage, given the enormous capital required to build and maintain data centers at a comparable level, making it difficult for new entrants to challenge the company's position. AWS held the largest market share among major cloud providers at the end of the first quarter, at 28%, ahead of Microsoft's Azure and Alphabet's Google Cloud.

In its most recent quarter, AWS sales grew 36.8% year over year to $42.2 billion, while operating income for the division jumped 63.6% to $16.6 billion. Amazon's broader retail segments have also performed well, with total company sales rising 19.6% compared with a year earlier, reaching $200.6 billion.

Despite that growth, Amazon's valuation has become more attractive this year as measured by its price-to-earnings ratio. Concerns among investors over the scale of the company's capital expenditures, including a planned $220 billion in spending this year largely tied to AI infrastructure, have pulled Amazon's P/E multiple down from well above 30 to around 22, making the stock cheaper than the S&P 500 index, which currently trades at a P/E ratio of about 29.

TJX Companies Benefits From Value-Conscious Shoppers

The second alternative highlighted by market watchers is TJX Companies, the parent of off-price retail chains including TJ Maxx, Marshalls and HomeGoods. The company has operated for nearly half a century using a business model built around purchasing excess or discounted merchandise from wholesalers, often due to canceled orders, out-of-season inventory or slowing demand from other retailers, and passing those savings on to customers at prices typically 20% to 60% below traditional retail.

That model tends to perform particularly well during periods of economic uncertainty, when wholesalers are more likely to have excess inventory and TJX gains additional negotiating leverage. With many consumers currently feeling squeezed by elevated prices, the company's most recent results have reflected that dynamic. TJX reported same-store sales growth of 6% across all its brands in its fiscal first quarter, with diluted earnings per share rising 29% to $1.19 for the period ended May 2.

The company has also continued to expand its physical footprint, opening 129 new stores over the past year and adding another 48 locations during the first quarter, bringing its total store count to 5,262. Despite that operational strength, TJX shares have underperformed the broader market this year, rising just 2.6% compared with an 11% gain for the S&P 500, a divergence that has left the stock's valuation more attractive than it was previously. TJX's price-to-earnings ratio has contracted from 34 to 31 over the same period.

A Case for Patience Over Hype

Taken together, analysts framing Amazon and TJX as alternatives to SpaceX argue that both companies offer investors exposure to durable, profitable growth trends, cloud computing infrastructure in Amazon's case and resilient consumer spending patterns in TJX's, without the valuation uncertainty and operational complexity currently associated with SpaceX's newly public stock. Both companies remain profitable and continue to expand their respective businesses, a contrast some investors say offers a more conventional path to long-term returns compared with the speculative enthusiasm currently surrounding SpaceX shares.