Whenever I buy a stock, I intend to hold it for three to five years and then analyze whether it’s worth holding for even longer. Over a time frame of that length, business results should take over as the key factor for stock performance rather than short-term market sentiment. However, there are a few stocks in my portfolio that I don’t ever intend to sell, unless something drastic changes with their investment theses.
Three of the stocks on this “hold forever” list look like fairly strong buys today. They are also heavily involved in the artificial intelligence (AI) arms race, and well positioned to take advantage of the massive technological shift that we’re undergoing.
Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) is a key part of most U.S. consumers’ lives. Nearly everyone has purchased something on its marketplace before, and many people (including myself) do a significant amount of their shopping through its e-commerce platform.
However, I’m more excited about its cloud computing business, Amazon Web Services (AWS), which provides computing power that clients can use to host websites, process data, or train AI models. Cloud computing allows clients to run their businesses in a more asset-light manner, as they can easily scale up or down the amount of processing power they use, and they don’t have to buy or maintain the hardware themselves. AWS provided 50% of Amazon’s operating income in Q4 despite accounting for just 15% of its revenue.
Grand View Research forecasts that between now and 2030, the cloud computing market will grow at an annualized rate of 21% to $2.39 trillion. Amazon is perfectly positioned to take advantage of this massive growth trend. With Amazon having a firm grip on the consumer goods and cloud computing markets, it’s a great stock to buy and hold.
The investment thesis for Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG) (NASDAQ: GOOGL) shares many similarities to the thesis for Amazon. While Amazon dominates U.S. e-commerce, Alphabet rules search with the Google search engine. This legacy business generates a massive amount of money from advertising.
Alphabet also has a cloud computing segment, and in Q4, Google Cloud’s revenue rose by 30% year over year versus AWS’s 19% growth. AWS remains much larger, generating $28.8 billion in revenue compared to Google Cloud, which generated $12 billion. Still, the same tailwinds apply to both.
Alphabet also has made significant investments in AI, and its Gemini generative AI model has become a top performer in this space. While some investors were worried that Alphabet’s tight grip on the search market would be weakened as AI was integrated into its competitors’ products, Google has made similar changes, and thus far has largely maintained its wide lead in the space.
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