If you want your $1,000 to turn into a whole lot more a few years down the road, buying stocks is a great idea. But not just any stocks. The best bet is a company that has a track record of earnings growth -- and solid future prospects too.

You can find them in any industry. Today, though, let's look at retailers. It's been a tough year for them -- higher inflation and economic troubles have weighed on companies and consumers. But there still are some players that have what it takes to weather the storm and perform over the long haul. The following two companies actually generate revenue from customers before they even buy anything. Let's check out these winning retail players.

You don't have to sign up for Amazon's (AMZN -3.01%) Prime program to shop on the e-commerce website. But more than 200 million people have. And that means Amazon is bringing in steady annual revenue from them. Amazon says Prime members' spending has been increasing -- and they're relying more and more on Amazon for shopping and entertainment.

Of course, today's economic environment is weighing on retail. That's hurt Amazon's earnings in recent times.

But here's some good news. The company's cloud computing business -- Amazon Web Services (AWS) -- continues to report double-digit growth in sales and operating income. That's in spite of the current economic situation. And AWS actually is the big profit driver. AWS last year accounted for more than 70% of Amazon's total operating income.

This means Amazon can count on AWS during these difficult times -- as well as in easier times. Importantly, AWS is the market leader. And the cloud computing market is expected to grow in the double digits through this decade. AWS should continue to drive Amazon's growth well into the future.

As for e-commerce, woes may not be over. Amazon must still manage higher costs. Shoppers may not spend as much if inflation hurts their wallets. But the tough times won't last forever. History shows us economic downturns are followed by recovery and growth. As a market leader, Amazon is well positioned to benefit once the pressures of inflation and a difficult economy ease.

Prospects look good for these two Amazon businesses. And the company's track record shows us it can deliver top-notch earnings -- and share performance -- over time. That makes it a great buy for long-term investors.

AMZN data by YCharts.

You have to pay a membership fee to shop at Costco Wholesale (COST -4.26%). In return, you get prices that usually beat those of other retailers. This business model has worked for Costco over the long term. Earnings and return on invested capital have climbed over time.

COST Net Income (Annual) data by YCharts.

Of course, you might wonder whether, in difficult economic times like right now, people may reconsider paying a membership fee before even setting foot in a store.

I would argue that this actually might be a moment of strength for Costco. Though there is an annual fee to pay, customers who shop at Costco often enough clearly get their money's worth. So, when they're worried about spending, customers might favor Costco over other stores.

Costco has shown that its membership continues to grow. The company recently hit an all-time high in membership renewal rates. At the end of the fiscal fourth quarter, Costco's renewal rate in the U.S. and Canada reached 92.6%, up 0.3 percentage points from the previous quarter. And the number of cardholders climbed 6.5% year over year to more than 118 million at the end of the fourth quarter.

The trend in executive memberships also supports the idea of strong future revenue prospects. Executive memberships cost double the amount of a traditional membership. This higher level of membership comes with various benefits. Executive membership is on the rise. And that's important because these members make up a significant share of sales -- nearly 72%.

Now let's talk about price. Trading at 33 times forward earnings estimates, Costco isn't the cheapest retailer on the block. But considering Costco's earnings track record and today's membership growth, it's worth paying a premium for this stock.

And Costco's valuation isn't as high as it was a few months ago. It's declined 22% since the start of the year. This looks like the perfect opportunity to get in on this remarkable stock.

John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods Market, an Amazon subsidiary, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. Adria Cimino has positions in Amazon. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Amazon and Costco Wholesale. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

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Got $1,000? Here Are 2 Remarkable Stocks to Buy - The Motley Fool

Nutanix(NTNX 1.70%) dazzled investors in its latest earnings report.The cloud stock jumped 29% on Thursday as the company beat estimates on the top and bottom lines in its fiscal fourth quarter.

Though annual contract value (ACV) billings increased 10% to $193.2 million, revenue actually fell 1% to $385.5 million due to the timing of contracts and supply chain delays with its server partners. That top-line number was still much better than estimates at $354.9 million as contract renewals in the quarter were strong, and it actually faced fewer supply chain issues than expected.

On the bottom line, its loss per share narrowed from $0.26 to $0.17, compared to estimates for a per-share loss of $0.38. And Nutanix posted positive free cash flow (FCF) of $23.2 million, compared to a loss of $42.2 million in the quarter a year ago. The company finished the year with an FCF profit of $18.5 million -- its first year with positive free cash flow since 2018.

Though the recent results were promising, Nutanix has mostly disappointed investors over its history. Shares of the company, which makes hybrid cloud infrastructure software that makes it easier for businesses to move applications between public and private clouds, are actually down from where they closed on their initial public offering (IPO) day in 2016.

Over its time as a publicly traded company, Nutanix has transitioned from a hardware company that initially sold a box to run its software into a software company and then a subscription software company. Later, the company shifted its sales focus from total contract value to annual contract value, further clouding the financial picture for investors. Though, that transition is now complete.

Nutanix appears to be moving past much of the earlier noise and false starts that plagued the stock. As its average contract term has fallen, revenue growth is lagging behind other top-line metrics, like ACV billings and annual recurring revenue. However, management expects that gap to narrow as its average contract length stabilizes at around three years. Meanwhile, a greater percentage of its growth comes from renewals, which will improve profitability and smooth its revenue growth.

The company has long earned high customer satisfaction marks. Its net promoter score is 90, meaning nearly all its customers would recommend the product to a peer. Further, its gross renewal rate is also above 90%, showing that the vast majority of its customers stick with the product.

Nutanix has also renewed its commitment to profitability, aiming for a 10%-15% free cash flow margin by fiscal 2025. That would give it at least $300 million in free cash flow. It's laying off 4% of its workforce to help get there, saying it would reduce annual expenses by $55 million-$60 million.

Despite macro headwinds weighing on other cloud stocks, Nutanix expressed confidence about the upcoming fiscal year, even mentioning on the earnings call that the company can benefit from a sluggish economy because its product helps customers save money. Management also said it expected to benefit from Broadcom's acquisition of chief rival VMWare as any changes or disruptions there could drive more customers to Nutanix.

Finally, its guidance calls for fiscal 2023 revenue of $1.77 billion-$1.78 billion, or 12.3% growth at the midpoint, and an adjusted operating margin of 2%, showing it should be profitable (at least on an adjusted basis). It called for ACV billings of $895 million-$900 million, up 18.7% from 2022.

The buy case for the stock looks a lot stronger after the latest quarter as the company's financial performance is clearly improving, moving quickly toward profitability. However, given its erratic history, it may be best for investors to take a wait-and-see approach here. Compared to other cloud stocks, Nutanix is less expensive according to most metrics, but that's because its growth rate is also slower and it's been unprofitable throughout its history.

Nutanix's quarter of outperformance is promising, but investors are better off waiting another quarter or two to see whether the momentum continues into fiscal 2023. Given its 2025 free cash flow target, there should still be plenty of upsides to capture if the turnaround really does play out.

Jeremy Bowman has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool recommends Broadcom Ltd, Nutanix, and VMware. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

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This Lesser-Known Cloud Computing Company Is Primed for a Turnaround. Is It Time To Buy? - The Motley Fool

GMR Varalakshmi Foundation (GMRVF), the corporate social responsibility arm of the GMR Group, will be offering a free course for the underprivileged in cloud computing, in collaboration with Tech Mahindra Foundation. Students who graduated with B.Tech. (CSC, IT, ECE), B.Sc. (computer science) and BCA degrees between 2019 and 2022 and are residents of Rangareddy district can apply for the three-month course.

The training will be conducted four days a week at the GMR Varalakshmi Centre for Empowerment and Livelihoods, Airport campus, Shamshabad, and for two days at the Tech Mahindra Academy, said CEO of GMRVF Ashwani Lohani.

Trainees enrolled for this course can pursue the AWS (Amazon Web Service)-certified Cloud Practitioner course. GMRVF and Tech Mahindra Foundation will facilitate the selected candidates to take this exam. Placement support will also be provided for all the successful candidates, said a press release on Monday.

This course is open to both male and female candidates. GMRVF will provide free boarding and lodging to all selected male candidates during the training period. There will be 20 trainees in each batch, with the first one starting from September 8.

Interested candidates may contact the GMR Varalakshmi Centre for Empowerment and Livelihoods, Shamshabad, or call 89198-90976/ 99855-74742.

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Free course in cloud computing for the less privileged - The Hindu

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 06, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Zeet, the integrated DevOps and deployment platform for software developers, today announced it has closed on a $4.3 million seed funding round led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from existing investor Race Capital as well as engineering leaders from AWS, Google, Twitch, Repl.it, Yelp, Sentry and more. Zeet intends to use the proceeds to accelerate its hiring process as the company continues to attract more customers and developers to its cloud-native DevOps platform.

In the increasingly complicated world of cloud computing, Zeet provides a simple interface for developers to make the most of their cloud. Instead of re-inventing the wheel, Zeet operates existing enterprise tooling and cloud services like AWS Lambda, AWS RDS, Kubernetes, Prometheus, KNative, and Keda across AWS and the Google Cloud Platform, so developers can focus on building products with confidence without worrying about how their applications are running. Additionally, since Zeet runs in the customers cloud accounts, DevOps engineers are able to bring the tools theyre already familiar with to manage their infrastructure. Zeets Heroku-like interface allows any application engineer to easily create infrastructure, generate CI/CD pipelines, provision SSL certificates, and scale their services.

With support for multiple clouds, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Services, DigitalOcean, Coreweave, and more, Zeet allows developers to move applications between clouds, reduce latency, and utilize specialized services from each cloud.

Zeet was founded to level the playing field for engineering teams and companies," said Johnny Dallas, founder and CEO of Zeet. Our platform allows any developer to get FAANG-quality infrastructure at the push of a button, and is already trusted by more than 18,000 developers. With this funding, we will continue to scale out our own engineering team and achieve our ambitious product roadmap. We plan to add compatibility for many more types of infrastructure resources, starting with Terraform and Helm chart deployments, as well as make more complex full-stack integrations like canary deployments and end-to-end tracing a breeze for any team.

Zeets two founders, Johnny Dallas, 20, and Zihao Zhang, 25, met in 2018 at Bebo, which was later acquired by Amazons Twitch. Dallas remains the youngest-ever AWS re:Invent speaker, after his 2018 talk describing the internal developer platform built by the pair which helped Bebo scale to every available AWS region, and manage thousands of concurrent machines without any full-time SRE team. After being escorted in to the casino venue by Amazon security due to his age, Dallas later became the youngest engineer to have worked at Amazon.

As cloud infrastructure has grown and matured over the past decade, it has become a bewildering array of services, each one with its own menu of configuration options. The whole point of cloud was not to think about infrastructure, yet developers have to spend non-trivial time learning and configuring cloud infrastructure," said Bogomil Balkansky, partner at Sequoia. "Zeet is a great way to get back to the original promise of cloud: a simple and elegant experience abstracting a rich set of services. We are thrilled to support the Zeet founders in their journey."

Democratizing server application deployment is key to the continued proliferation of web computing. Without any doubt, Johnny and Zeet are the answer to cost, risks, security, deployment optimization and scaling, said Alfred Chuang, partner at Race Capital. Any company looking to scale on the cloud will need Zeet, which is one of the many reasons we found this to be a critical investment. I am excited to partner with Johnny and the team.

Zeet has made it so every engineer can focus on writing applications, without thinking about infrastructure. Instead of all the pressure of deployment falling onto one team, everyone is able to use Zeet on their own without any supervision needed, says Jake Loo, CTO of Thirdweb. It serves everyone, no matter their skill level - our entry-level engineers don't have to be experts, and our cloud experts can build on top of Zeet to make their job easier. I dont think we could go back to the old way.

About Zeet

Zeet is an all-in-one automated DevOps platform across the major public cloud vendors. Zeet empowers developers to ship in minutes, scale to millions of users, and deploy across multiple cloud vendors. For more information or a demo, please visit: https://zeet.co/ and follow Zeet on Twitter.

About Race Capital

Race Capital is an early-stage venture fund focused on investing in exceptional founders who are building market-transforming companies in the data, enterprise, infrastructure, and fintech sectors. Our team are seed investors in Databricks, Solana, FTX, Agora.io, Zeet, and many other great companies. For more information, visit https://race.capital/.

Press Contact

Media Contact For Race CapitalDukas Linden Public RelationsEmily Burnham / Zach KouweRace@dlpr.com

Media Contact For Sequoia CapitalASM CommunicationsAbby McAdamsAbby@asmcomms.com

How Zeet Works

To use Zeet, you simply authorize your cloud account and select a Github repository. Zeet automatically provisions resources within your account, configures a CI/CD pipeline, and provides a production-ready endpoint to your project in minutes. Zeets Web UI makes it simple for any application developer to quickly assess the status of an environment - no DevOps knowledge needed.

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/62a56e8e-d342-4341-a0e9-5c2ebaa47cc3

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DevOps Automation Platform Zeet Raises $4.3M Seed Funding Led by Sequoia Capital with Participation from Race Capital - GlobeNewswire

Fidelity International has introduced a suite of five thematic equity ETFs in Europe targeting the emerging technology themes of clean energy, electric vehicles & future transportation, cloud computing, digital health, and the metaverse.

Fidelity has launched its first thematic equity ETFs in Europe.

The funds are linked to indices developed in-house by Fidelitys quantitative research and investment team.

Each index covers a broad global universe consisting of stocks from across the market capitalization spectrum while using a combination of company revenue data and natural language processing (NLP) to select companies best aligned with the underlying theme.

NLP is used to analyze text-based documents to identify companies with relevant keywords associated with business activities linked to a specific theme. Stocks are then assigned a thematic relevancy score and those with the highest scores are selected for inclusion in the index.

Companies must typically generate at least 50% of their total revenue from business activities relevant to the theme to be eligible for inclusion.

Each index also includes an environmental, social, and governance (ESG) screen which, according to Fidelity, results in at least 50% of each indexs underlying constituents having sustainable characteristics. As such, each ETF is classified as an Article 8 product under the European Unions Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR).

Commenting on the new listings, Nick King, Head of ETFs at Fidelity International, said: Thematic investing seeks to identify and capitalize on long-term, structural trends by investing across countries and sectors to capture transformative drivers of the global economy, businesses, and society. Many of these themes have an enhanced focus on sustainability as well as seeking to address specific social and environmental challenges.

Our thematic indices have been constructed through a collaboration of our proprietary fundamental, sustainable, and quantitative research capabilities to ensure that we are providing clients with exposure to the best stocks in each particular theme.

The ETFs have been listed across Europe including on London Stock Exchange, Deutsche Brse Xetra, and SIX Swiss Exchange, with a further listing on Borsa Italiana expected in the near future.

Each fund comes with an expense ratio of 0.50%.

The ETFs

The Fidelity Clean Energy UCITS ETF (FRNG) tracks the Fidelity Clean Energy ESG Tilted Index. The index reflects the performance of companies that distribute, produce or provide technology or equipment to support the production of energy from solar, wind, hydrogen, and other renewable sources.

The Fidelity Electric Vehicles and Future Transportation UCITS ETF (FDRV) tracks the Fidelity Electric Vehicles and Future Transportation ESG Tilted Index. The index reflects the performance of companies engaged in the production of electric or autonomous vehicles and their components, as well as firms developing technologies or energy systems that aim to change the future of transportation.

The Fidelity Cloud Computing UCITS ETF (FCLD) tracks the Fidelity Cloud Computing ESG Tilted Index. The index reflects the performance of companies that provide products or services enabling the increased adoption of cloud computing, characterized by the delivery of computing services over the internet.

The Fidelity Digital Health UCITS ETF (FDHC) tracks the Fidelity Digital Health ESG Tilted Index. The index reflects the performance of companies providing healthcare records management, connected healthcare devices, surgical robotics, telemedicine, and other technology-enabled healthcare products and services.

The Fidelity Metaverse UCITS ETF (FMTV) tracks the Fidelity Metaverse ESG Tilted Index. The index reflects the performance of companies that develop, manufacture, distribute, and sell products or services related to establishing and enabling the metaverse.

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Fidelity rolls out five thematic ETFs in Europe - ETF Strategy