The holiday season brings a special kind of calm to financial markets. Trading volume drops, the news cycle slows to a crawl (except for the occasional geopolitical drama), and investors get a rare chance to step back and think about what comes next.

This is also when analysts earn their keep. They're busy crafting their S&P 500 forecasts and gearing up for the Q1 earnings deluge. Now, let's be honest about analyst ratings for a moment. They're not some crystal ball that predicts stock prices with perfect accuracy. Some analysts inflate their price targets to maintain cozy relationships with company executives, which is about as shocking as finding out that Wall Street has conflicts of interest.

But here's the thing: when analysts argue with real conviction, whether it's a strong buy or a strong sell, markets tend to pay attention.

So let's dig into five stocks that analysts are currently rating as Strong Buys and explore why these professional number-crunchers think these companies have particularly bright prospects in 2026.

SEI Investments Co.: The Wealth Management Makeover

SEI Investments (SEIC) is a $10 billion financial services firm attempting something ambitious: reinventing itself from a traditional wealth management shop into a "wealth-tech" company that sells technology solutions to a global network of banks, advisors, managers, and institutional investors.

The centerpiece of this transformation is the SEI Wealth Platform, which helps legacy financial firms drag their outdated systems into the modern era. Think of it as giving a technological facelift to firms still running software that looks like it was designed when people thought Y2K would end civilization. The platform keeps gaining market share among wealth managers, which is the main reason analysts are so bullish on SEI Investments' ability to pull off this metamorphosis.

SEI Investments scored two upgrades in December alone, with both Piper Sandler and Keefe, Bruyette, and Woods bumping the stock from Neutral to Outperform. Morgan Stanley raised its price target to $117 earlier this week. The average price target across these three firms now sits at $107, implying nearly 23% upside from current levels.

The technical picture looks promising too. The stock has burst through both the 50-day and 200-day simple moving averages, with confirmation from a bullish crossover in the Moving Average Convergence Divergence (MACD) indicator. In other words, the breakout appears to be already underway.

Copa Holdings SA: The Dividend King of Airlines

Copa Holdings (CPA) is what you'd get if someone tried to create the ideal income stock in the airline industry. It offers safe, steady dividends and consistent revenue growth, which is basically the opposite of what most people expect from airlines (an industry typically known for bankruptcy filings and disappointing investors).

Copa's market cap is just $5.4 billion, but it punches above its weight thanks to its 'Hub of the Americas' in Panama. This hub serves as a crucial connection point between North and South American travel, and Copa Holdings keeps its margins healthy by hauling cargo alongside passengers.

The dividend yield currently stands at 5.05% with a payout ratio below 40%, which offers tremendous security for a dividend above 5%. Copa expects to receive new Boeing aircraft this year that will expand capacity by up to 13%, and the company already generates better margins than most of its U.S. competitors. MarketDash's Analyst Rating Forecast has CPA at 4.2, a Strong Buy rating based on 13 analyst reports.

The three most recent price target updates from JPMorgan, Citigroup, and Evercore average $160, representing potential upside of more than 22%. A MACD crossover also marks the breakout point on the daily chart, with the stock now trading back above its 50-day simple moving average after nearly two months of resistance. With the Relative Strength Index (RSI) trending upward, plus rare above-80 scores in both Momentum and Value rankings, CPA offers an unusual combination of upside potential and steady dividend income.

FB Financial Corp.: Banking on the South

FB Financial (FBK) is the parent company of FirstBank, which just received Federal Reserve approval to be acquired by PNC Financial Services Group. This follows FB Financial's own acquisition of Southern States Bancshares, creating a more focused company concentrated on high-growth southern markets like Nashville.

Banking analysts at Piper Sandler, Cantor Fitzgerald, and Keefe, Bruyette, and Woods all have Outperform ratings on the stock, with price targets ranging from $58 to $66. FBK shares posted a 12% gain in 2025 and are already up more than 5% to start 2026.

Technical traders probably noticed the Golden Cross back in September, when the 50-day simple moving average crossed above the 200-day simple moving average. This triggered a sharp rally through October before the stock pulled back to the 50-day average. The stock has been trading in a range for most of the last two months, but it's once again bouncing off the 50-day average with the RSI mirroring the move. Shares will likely trade sideways until FB Financial reports its Q4 2025 results on January 21 after the market closes.

Archrock Inc.: Picks and Shovels for the AI Boom

Archrock (AROC) is an energy company, but it's more of a 'picks and shovels' play than a traditional oil and gas firm. The company builds natural gas compression equipment and provides installation and aftermarket services, generating recurring revenue from its client base.

Some of Archrock's biggest clients are providing energy to AI data centers, and the company's backlog keeps growing larger with each passing quarter. This is also an excellent choice for income-focused investors, offering a 3.27% dividend yield with a 55% payout ratio.

A breakout might be developing for AROC shares, driven by a series of 2025 analyst upgrades (currently holding a 4.5 Strong Buy rating based on 10 analyst reports) and several promising technical signals. The stock spent most of the second half of 2025 stuck in a tight range but broke above both the 50-day and 200-day simple moving averages in December with a matching bullish MACD crossover. Despite a slight revenue decline in Q3 2025 (its first quarterly drop in over three years), AROC appears well-positioned to benefit from increased energy demand from AI data centers this year.

Serve Robotics Inc.: The Wild Card

Every conviction buy list needs a long shot, right? Serve Robotics (SERV) is the $1.17 billion company behind those small food-delivery robots you might have seen rolling around sidewalks if you've spent time in larger cities recently. Serve Robotics specializes in last-mile autonomous delivery and has signed partnerships with Uber Eats and DoorDash, though the company also plans to branch into retail and grocery delivery.

The company's flagship product is the Serve robot, which uses a four-wheel design with LIDAR cameras to navigate city sidewalks. Watching these little guys dodge pedestrians and navigate crosswalks is either charming or slightly unsettling, depending on your feelings about our autonomous future.

The company's competitive advantage in this emerging field is substantial, which explains why analysts have issued such ambitious price targets. Oppenheimer rates the stock a Buy with a $20 target, while Northland Capital Markets recently increased their target to $26. The stock recently broke out of a short-term downtrend with a five-day winning streak and now has technical momentum building on the MACD and RSI indicators.

The thing about Serve Robotics is that it's genuinely speculative. This isn't a dividend aristocrat with decades of steady performance. It's a bet on autonomous delivery becoming a mainstream reality, which could either be incredibly prescient or premature. But that's exactly why it fits on a list like this. Sometimes the highest-conviction calls are the ones that require you to squint and imagine a future that doesn't quite exist yet.

These five stocks span wildly different industries and risk profiles, from the steady transformation story at SEI Investments to the moonshot potential at Serve Robotics. What they share is strong analyst conviction heading into 2026. Whether that conviction proves justified will depend on execution, market conditions, and probably a healthy dose of luck. But as the holiday season winds down and serious investing season ramps up, these are the names that professional analysts are putting their reputations behind.