The S&P/ASX 200 Index (ASX: XJO) was in sensational form on Tuesday and stormed to a four-month high.
Some ASX shares were in even better form yesterday and surged to record highs.
Three that have just achieved this feat are listed below. Here's why they are on fire right now:
Appen Ltd (ASX: APX)
The Appen share price raced to a new record high of $38.47 on Tuesday. The shares of the global leader in the development of high-quality, human-annotated training data for machine learning and artificial intelligence have been on fire this year thanks to its strong FY 2019 result in February and its positive guidance for the current financial year. In respect to the latter, Appen is expecting to deliver underlying EBITDA in the range of $125 million to $130 million this year. This represents a 23.8% to 28.7% increase on FY 2019's underlying EBITDA of $101 million. Management has reaffirmed this guidance twice during the pandemic.
Kogan.com Ltd (ASX: KGN)
The Kogan share price raced higher and hit a new record of $18.65 yesterday. Investors have been fighting to get hold of the ecommerce company's shares after the pandemic accelerated the shift to online shopping and put a rocket up Kogan's sales growth. Pleasingly, despite physical retail stores opening as normal over the last couple of months, sales on its website remain exceptionally strong. For the three months ending 30 June 2020, Kogan's gross sales grew by more than 95% and its gross profit increased by over 115%. Things were even better for its adjusted EBITDA, which lifted more than 149% during the fourth quarter. This took its adjusted EBITDA growth to over 57% for the full year.
NEXTDC Ltd (ASX: NXT)
The NEXTDC share price continued its positive run and hit a record high of $11.61. Investors have been buying the data centre operator's shares in 2020 after the pandemic accelerated the shift to the cloud. This led to very strong demand for capacity in its centres from blue chip customers. As a result of the strong demand, the company is pulling forward capacity expansion plans and the construction of new data centres. This appears to have positioned NEXTDC to deliver very strong earnings growth over the medium term.