The market has been a little unusual lately. Many investors are looking at the market’s brightest growth stories and looking for the next big mover.
However, veteran investors can attest that sustainable high-quality earnings and reasonable valuations are what matters in the long run.
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With that as a backdrop, here’s a closer look at three stocks you can easily buy and hold forever. See if you can identify an overarching philosophical element that each name brings to the table.
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You may already know the e-commerce giant Amazon(NASDAQ: AMZN) It hasn’t been particularly good lately. In fact, shares are currently trading at end-2024 levels, with the latest setback caused by plans to spend a staggering $200 billion worth of capital spending on AI infrastructure this year alone.
Before that, the headwinds were mainly the sheer difficulty of growing when you’re already a large company.
Still, this weakness is unlikely to last long once investors remember what makes this company such a strong one with considerable longevity. Such is its willingness to try almost anything to expand its revenue-generating ecosystem.
Think about it. Although cloud computing now accounts for more than half of its operating revenue, Amazon Web Services didn’t exist until 2006. What about Amazon’s advertising business? Although Amazon and its international sister sites have allowed sellers to pay to display their products for some time, the company has only recently begun to get serious about monetizing its traffic-rich e-commerce sites.
But it’s a brilliant rethinking of how to leverage assets. In 2025, Amazon generated high-margin revenue worth nearly $69 billion, a 22% increase from $56.2 billion in 2024. The Kindle e-reader, the 2017 acquisition of Whole Foods Market and Amazon Prime itself are other examples of the company’s creative thinking that ultimately expanded its revenue network.
Crucially, the company’s entrepreneurial spirit is one of being willing and able to adapt to developments in the world and new opportunities as they arise. This is unlikely to change anytime soon.
Understandably, many investors are wary of owning stocks Berkshire Hathaway(NYSE: BRKA)(NYSE: BRKB) Since Warren Buffett resigned as CEO and chief stock picker late last year. However, much of this concern stems from a misunderstanding of what Berkshire actually is.
Although people often think of it as a mutual fund, Berkshire Hathaway is not a mutual fund made up solely of Buffett-endorsed stocks. In fact, only about a third of the group’s current value reflects its holdings in listed companies. Instead, Berkshire is essentially the most amazing insurance company in the world, taking advantage of what some even consider to be perfect failures in the system. As Buffett himself explained in 2010, “This pick-up-now-pay-later model [insurance] Let’s hold a lot of money—what we call “float”—that will eventually flow to someone else. At the same time, we can invest in these outstanding shares for the benefit of Berkshire… This combination allows us to enjoy the use of free money – and, better yet, get paid for holding it. “
Don’t get me wrong. Berkshire’s current management team must still invest its assets wisely to achieve growth and cash flow and ensure that its insurance business remains solvent in the near and distant future.
However, doing so isn’t limited to stocks. Nearly a third of Berkshire Hathaway’s current value is made up of reliable private cash cows such as flooring company Shaw, Pilot Travel Centers, Dairy Queen, railroad BNSF and Duracell batteries, among others. As long as current CEO Greg Abel doesn’t try to tweak this proven winning structure too much (which is impossible), Berkshire can not only survive indefinitely, but thrive indefinitely.
last added letter(Nasdaq: Google)(Nasdaq: Google) Put on your list of stocks to buy and hold forever, especially when you can buy at about 10% below the early February peak. That’s probably all the discounts you’ll see from that ticker in a while.
Just like Amazon, the reason Alphabet has such great long-term prospects is its willingness and ability to grow. In its infancy, it was just a search engine. At the same time, it has become the world’s most popular email service, the world’s most used mobile operating system, and the most-watched streaming platform in at least the United States. That’s YouTube.
Meanwhile, Google remains The world’s most used search engine is also the company’s biggest cash cow, although it’s not inconceivable that cloud computing could eventually become its breadwinner once more organizations start leveraging AI for reasons like drug development, financial modeling, factory optimization, and more.
While Google Cloud’s revenue rose 48% year over year last quarter, driving further growth in operating income, its $17.6 billion in revenue is still just the tip of the iceberg of what Straits Research believes will be a cloud computing industry worth $3.3 trillion annually by 2032.
What’s more: While institutional interest in Google’s homegrown, AI-capable tensor processing units is certainly impressive (Anthropic, salespersonand OpenAI has made a big commitment to use its latest Tensor chip), but it is not fully realized that Alphabet can also use this advanced hardware for its own purposes. It already has a strong presence in most aspects of the World Wide Web. If it can use AI to predict trends or socio-cultural developments, it can evolve and develop new products or tweak search results before the need arises rather than after the fact. That’s huge.
Before buying Amazon stock, consider the following factors:
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James Brumley works at Alphabet. The Motley Fool owns and recommends Alphabet, Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and Salesforce. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
3 Stocks to Buy and Hold Forever: Investing in Your Portfolio for the Long-Term Originally posted by The Motley Fool
