10 Top Consumer Discretionary Stocks (2025)

Discretionary Consumer Goods Prepare A Comeback

Since interest rates have been rising in the post-pandemic period, consumer spending has somewhat struggled to keep up, leaving the large majority of stock market gains stemming from investment in AI rather than broader economic growth.

75% of gains, 80% of profits, 90% of capex—AI’s grip on the S&P is total

Lisa Shalett – Morgan Stanley Wealth Management’s chief investment officer

As rates were cut down for the first time in a while in September 2025, the opposite move can be anticipated, with expectations that investors will soon begin increasing exposure to consumer discretionary stocks.

Consumer discretionary stocks represent companies that sell non-essential goods and services. These are the things people tend to buy when they have extra disposable income.

Unlike consumer staples (such as groceries or household products), discretionary spending includes areas like entertainment, apparel, restaurants, travel, and luxury goods. So people tend to buy them only when they have spare cash, or if their investments and assets are growing in value.

It leads these stocks to be closely tied to economic cycles. They also follow consumer trends, reflecting shifts in behavior, preferences, and lifestyles that drive where and how people spend their money.

Por ejemplo:

• The rise of e-commerce has created retail giants like Amazon and Nike.
• Cars are now a content delivery platform and might drive themselves soon
• Streaming, travel, and experiences continue to gain share over physical goods.
• Sustainability and value consciousness are reshaping product innovation and brand loyalty.

Investing in consumer discretionary companies that anticipate or align with these evolving trends can lead to strong growth potential, especially when overall spending is growing.

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Best 10 Consumer Discretionary Stocks for Consumer Trends

1. Amazon.com Inc.— E-commerce, Cloud & AI Flywheel

Amazon’s rise saw it transforming from an online bookstore to an “everything” retailer, to a tech giant.

So when consumers and investors think of Amazon, they should remember that not only is it one of the world’s largest retailers, but also the global leader in cloud computing, and an AI heavyweight.

This ability to create and handle advanced tech is giving Amazon a strong advantage over its competition.

For example, it has among the world’s most advanced warehouses, with robots now finding and moving most of the goods orders on Amazon.

The company is also experimenting with many other very innovative retail technologies:

• “Just Walk Out” cashier-less stores, using a camera to determine the content of a cart.
• Autonomous logistics, with self-driving delivery vehicles.
• Drone deliveries.

Soon, the company might even be building an Internet constellation to rival Elon Musk’s Starlink and Zoox (self-driving robotaxi).

The strong commercial position of the company, as well as Prime subscription, is also generating a flood of data that can be used to improve its offers, notably with AI-powered personalization and cloud-based advertising analytics through AWS.

Lastly, the company is also active in IoT (Internet of Things) with Alexa, FireTV, an AI and voice-driven smart TV system, and the smart speakers & display Echo.

Thanks to the connection of its retail & logistics empire, and its dominance of cloud service, Amazon is likely still evolving into a global infrastructure company for commerce and AI services, able to turn data into sales and delivery seamlessly.

(Puedes leer Más sobre Amazon en su informe de inversión dedicado.)

2. Tesla, Inc.— EVs, Energy Storage & Autonomy

After having turned electric cars from glorified golf carts to cool status symbols on par with luxury car brands, Tesla is now an expanding brand active in energy, robotics, and AI.

This makes Tesla the quintessential example of hardware and software convergence in a consumer product.

Nowhere is it as apparent as for its self-driving car program. Contrary to the approach of literally every other company in this space, Tesla is using only the data from its Tesla cars to develop a self-driving AI, not using expensive and complex LIDAR systems (a strategic difference we explained in “2025: ¿El año en que los coches autónomos se generalizarán?").

The same expansion beyond EV is visible in energy, where Tesla is using its expertise in battery manufacturing to expand into fixed energy storage for both houses and utility-grid battery parks.

Lastly, as it has been at the forefront of integrating robotics and advanced manufacturing methods in its factories, it has also acquired enough experience to look to build humanoid robots.

Overall, investors would be short-sighted to see Tesla as just a company car, as the energy segment or reaching the elusive “full self-driving” capacity would make car manufacturing just a small part of the company’s activities.

At the same time, the company was always controversial, in large part due to the larger-than-life persona of its founder, Elon Musk. So volatility, politics, and intense debates over the company are as much a part of investing in Tesla as manufacturing and technological innovation.

(Puedes leer Más sobre Tesla en su informe de inversión dedicado.)

3. Apple— iPhone Cash Machine, On-Device AI

If technologies have changed our lives regularly for a century, each often stayed confined to a definite space. TVs in a living room, cars in a driveway, a computer at the office, or a home desk.

Apple changed that with the popularization of the concept of smartphones, making technology and software a much larger part of our daily lives, following us everywhere.

For a long time, Apple has been a device-centric company, with the Macintosh computer succeeded by the iPod, and then the iPhone.

To an extent, this is still partially true, with the sales of iPhone making around half of the company’s revenues, and even more if we consider that a lot of the App Store and other services sales are linked to the iPhone.

As the smartphone market is reaching maturity, this has prompted people to start worrying about what comes after the iPhone for Apple.

Over the years, the company’s management has explored many ideas, from augmented reality glasses to connected tracking devices and a self-driving car, but without a striking success or strong commitment to any of these.

One likely candidate could be AI, with the company claiming in April 2024 its AI ReALM was outperforming GPT-4 in capabilities, but since then losing key executives to Meta (META -2.65%) and overall perceived as lagging behind the market leaders in LLMs and other AI development.

Apple is also working on AI hardware, notably with the release in October 2025 of M5, its next-generation 10-core GPU architecture with a Neural Accelerator in each core.

This relative gap in product releases, however, should not be as big an issue for Apple as people sometimes think it is.

The iPhone is still one of the world’s most popular smartphone models, and sells at a price and margins that most of its competitors can only dream of. The brand image of the company is still very strong, with people using the Apple ecosystem extremely reluctant to move out of it.

This reflects in the company’s financial performance, with, for example +12% earnings per share growth in Q3 2025. So as long as Apple’s core business is humming steadily, it might not be the most exciting tech stock, but one of the world’s best consumer brands, something maybe even more valuable.

4. Marriott International— Asset-Light, Digital Loyalty

When looking for a premium travel experience, the accommodation is an essential part. For a long time, skilled personnel, high-quality construction, decor, and furniture were an essential part of a luxury hotel.

This is, of course, still true, but technology is increasingly important as well, something that a large group like Marriott is best positioned to develop and deploy at scale.

The company’s many brands include, for example, The Ritz-Carlton, Marriott, BVLGARI Hotels & Resorts, Sheraton, Residence Inn, etc.

La compañía ha sido ongoing a long process of so-called “digital transformation”, with an ICT spending estimated at $1.5 billion for 2023 already, seeing the adoption of a cloud-native platform to handle both its internal IT systems and its customer-facing offers like the central reservation system and loyalty platform.

This digital integration is now used for confirmed upgrades at booking and real-time loyalty point deposits.

Marriott is also deploying AI Agents for applications like an AI coach for contact center agents, automation of manual tasks like data entry, back-of-house monitoring, etc..

“We’re in deep discovery with agents. We have an agentic mesh capability that we’re building in our horizontal AI architecture, and we’re looking at use cases.”

Naveen Manga – Global chief information officer at Marriott.

Finally, the company is also embracing new technologies in hotel “hardware” like shape-shifting sofas, vanity mirrors that act as room dividers, and interactive art; while integrating its rooms with augmented reality, Internet of Things devices, and hybrid meeting solutions.

5. Netflix, Inc.— Streaming + AI-assisted Production

Audiovisual content at the age of cinema and TV was a very heavily top-down structure, with the public a somewhat passive receiver whose appreciation was only possible to estimate through ticket sales or at times unreliable ratings.

Direct streaming has not only radically changed how we consume, but also how cinema/TV content is produced:

• Instead of slowly releasing one episode at a time, entire seasons are now available at once.
• Rewatching older content is just one click away.
• No more need for a moment in a scenario where to put an ad break.

This back-and-forth between format and content is only going to get more intense in the future.

Netflix is at the forefront of experimenting with a further level of personalization of visual content. For example, Debido interactive movie, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, which was already released in 2018, where viewers could decide which ending the movie had.

Since then, the company has been working on AI-driven content recommendation, procedural production analytics, and more complex interactive storytelling.

AI could also start to be used to create movies themselves, with Netflix using generative AI for the first time in 2025 in its science fiction series El Eternauta.

“We remain convinced that AI represents an incredible opportunity to help creators make films and series better, not just cheaper.

“Using AI-powered tools, they were able to achieve an amazing result with remarkable speed and, in fact, that VFX sequence was completed 10 times faster than it could have been completed with traditional VFX tools and workflows.”

Ted Sarandos -Co-chief executive of Netflix

As both a content creator and distributor, Netflix will likely benefit greatly from AI.

On the content creation, it could cut down production costs, allowing for more ambitious artistic visions to be realized on a smaller budget. On the distribution side, the massive database of its users’ tastes in movies and series should help recommend the best content and promote new videos to the right audience.

Overall, Netflix’s history of being more technologically-driven and more adaptable than its larger studios’ competition might be the company’s most important competitive advantage, especially as AI-generated content threatens to flood the market with more content than the public can ever watch.

If this rather dire prediction comes to pass, it might turn out that the best way to filter too much AI-created content is by using another AI to find which one was made just for you. And for that task, our Netflix viewing history might be the most valuable data.

6. Booking Holdings Inc.— Data-Driven Travel Superapp

As screens and algorithms are taking over our lives, politics, and even cars, humans are going to want even more authentic experiences and “real life” memories.

A good way to do so is through travelling. Tourism has been a booming industry, and will likely keep doing so as more and more of the world’s population is entering the middle class. It represented a $10.6T industry in 2025, and is expected to grow to $17.5T by 2035.

Booking Holdings (booking.com and other brands) is the world’s leading provider of online travel and related services, operating in 220 countries and 40 languages.

It lists no less than 4 million accommodation properties, with 1.1 billion room nights in 2024 (up 9% year-to-year).

If not for the obvious drop and then recovery during the pandemic, the company has seen its earnings per share and revenues constantly growing for the past decade.

The company has always been looking to optimize the travel experience for its users, while maximizing customer benefits through loyalty programs, mobile app, pre-filled payment data, easier additional services like car rental or plane/train ticket booking, etc.

This has created many new opportunities for the company, with, for example, airline tickets purchased launched in 2019 with 1.9 million tickets bought in Q2 2019. By Q2 2025, 16.4 million airline tickets were bought through booking.

Today, Booking is deploying machine learning and AI for:

• Pricing optimization.
• Recommendations of travel options, accommodation, restaurants, etc.
• Personalized travel experience.

For training these AIs and using them as optimally as possible, the wealth of data from past travel of Booking’s users will be almost priceless.

7. Flutter Entertainment— Leading Online Betting Platform

Games, gambling, and betting on sports are activities as old as civilization, with dice found in Ancient Egyptian tombs, and betting on horse races or gladiator fights highly popular in the Roman Empire. The thrill and risks of trying to guess right, or just being lucky, seem to be a deep human instinct.

Flutter is the world’s leading online sports betting and iGaming operator, with a market-leading position in the US and across the world.

As such, it is well positioned to benefit from the shift online of this timeless activity, a $368B market expected to grow 8% CAGR to 2030, with 2x the revenues of the #2 in the UK market, and 3x of the #2 in the US market.

37% of revenues come from the US, 23% from the UK, followed by Italy, Australia, and other countries.

It manages many brands, each specializing in a specific type of betting or online gambling.

A strong point of the company is its very efficient customer acquisition process (ads, sponsorship, etc.), and strong cross-sell between its products, creating economies of scale and a strong competitive moat.

Another strong point is a very solid technology base, allowing for good handling of huge traffic volumes at low latency, a shared codebase across brands, and now leveraging AI and automation to enhance player experience, as well as internal finance monitoring or recruiting.

The company has built its own large language model (LLM) on internal documentation.

These advantages translate to lower costs, which can be passed on partially to customers, with a payout premium of 31% of that of other betting platforms.

8. The Home Depot— Pro Customer & AI-Enabled Retail

Not all discretionary spending is for entertainment or technology. A major budget item for households is their own home.

Home Depot is the world’s largest provider of construction materials, garden, and interior supplies. Like most other businesses, Home Depot is being quickly transformed by new technologies, including AI agents:

• Augmented reality (AR) for visualization of DIY projects.
• AI-driven supply chain automation, including predictive logistics using machine learning and robotics in warehouse operations.
• Tecnologías para hogares inteligentes.
• In-store computer vision against theft.
• AI-driven CRM & credit systems for professional and B2B sales.
• Dynamic price optimization for competitive positioning and margin optimization.
• Generative AI and LLM for increasing online conversion by replicating in-store expertise digitally.

La empresa también ha sido an investor in innovative solutions in the home improvement market through its VC branch.

Investments include Afero, a secure, end-to-end Internet of Things (IoT) platform;

Loadsmart, a freight technology company; Made Renovation, an end-to-end digital platform for bathroom renovations;

Roadie, a crowdsourced delivery platform that enables same-day delivery to more than 20,000 zip codes nationwide.

Home Depot’s “smart retail” is looking to deploy tech where it is useful (AR to encourage spending, online sales, supply chain, etc.) while still keeping the purchase experience simple and manageable “offline”.

9. Yum! Brands— QSR Automation & Voice AI

Fast food is probably the part of the restaurant industry that has, from inception, been the most enthusiastic in embracing technology. From automated fryers in the early McDonald’s, the sector is now progressively reducing the human labor required to order, cook a meal, or clean the facilities.

This can greatly benefit companies like Yum! Brands, that operate Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut, and The Habit Burger Grill. Its subsidiaries franchise or operate over 61,000 restaurants in more than 155 countries.

Yum! Brands and NVIDIA (NVDA + 0.19%) are collaborating to deploy AI over Yum!’s restaurants:

• Generative AI-powered customer-facing experiences, like automated ordering.
• AI-accelerated voice ordering agents.
• Computer vision software to analyze drive-thru traffic, but also back-of-house labor management.
• AI-driven analytics and agents to assess restaurant performance, generating personalized action plans for restaurant managers based on best practices from top-performing locations.

“At Yum, we have a bold vision to deliver leading-edge, AI-powered technology capabilities to our customers and team members globally.

Joe Park, chief digital and technology officer of Yum! Brands, Inc.

“NVIDIA’s software makes it affordable for even the largest restaurant company to improve operations and customer experiences, proving AI can pay off at every location.

Andrew Sun – Global Director of Retail, CPG and QSR Business Development, NVIDIA

Yum! Brands’ adoption of AI is only one of the possible applications of technology to the highly optimized and standardized setup of fast food restaurants.

For example, robotics solutions for food preparation, digital twins for kitchen design, and predictive ordering analytics can all increase efficiency further.

Recently, inflation and high labor costs have dented the image of fast food chains as a cheap option for a meal, even if Yum! Brands have been able to keep growing thanks to international expansion.

The increased productivity from the deployment of AI and automated cooking could help cut costs while simultaneously personalizing customer experiences at scale, something traditional restaurants will likely struggle to compete with.

10. Sony Group Corp.— PlayStation, IP, and Image Sensors

Not all tech companies are American, even if it can feel this way with the rise in stock markets of the so-called “Siete magníficos.

One such overseas tech leader is SONY, a Japanese company that has revolutionized several times entertainment, gaming, and hardware with products like the Walkman or the PlayStation.

Today, Sony’s PlayStation is still one of the largest gaming consoles, having sold over 80 million units of PlayStation 5 by the summer of 2025, and the PlayStation 6 is expected to start production before 2027.

The company is also a major content producer, with video game IPs (Horizon, Ghost of Tsushima o The Last of Us), un sello musical (Usher, Whitney Houston, Bob Dylan), y Estudios Sony Pictures (Cazafantasmas, Jumanji, Hombres de Negro, Spider-Man).

Less well-known to the general public is the very strong presence of Sony in the image sensor market. Sony controla el 42% del mercado de la CEI (CMOS Image Sensor -Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor).

The presence in sensors combined with both consumer hardware and content creation should make Sony a major beneficiary of any increase in discretionary spending, either directly or indirectly.