Robinhood Market's easy-to-use online investing platform is used by millions to buy and trade stocks. More than 17 million investors use Robinhood every month, and while the platform has earned a reputation for having investors looking for short-term trades of meme stocks, there are plenty of users on the platform who are looking for great long-term stock bets as well.
If you fall into the latter group, there are at least three solid companies popular with Robinhood users that should be great investments over the long term. Let's find out a bit more about these three stocks.
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1. Nvidia
It's no surprise that Nvidia (NVDA 3.77%) is one of the stocks most widely held by Robinhood investors right now. The company has been a dominant force in the graphics processing market for years, and the company continues to carve out new growth opportunities.
Take artificial intelligence (AI), for example. While selling its graphics processors for use in the gaming industry is still the company's top revenue generator, AI has quickly become a key source of sales for Nvidia as well. In the fourth quarter of fiscal 2022, data center revenue (which includes chip sales for use in AI), surged more than 71% year over year and accounted for nearly 43% of the company's total sales. That's great news for Nvidia and its investors because AI chips are expected to grow into a $71 billion market by 2026.
But AI is hardly the only exciting thing about owning Nvidia stock. The company is also immensely profitable, with $9.8 billion in net income in fiscal 2022, more than double its 2021 net income.
2. Apple
Many tech investors put their money into flashy, fast-growing tech stocks in 2020 and 2021, but over the past six months, there's been an exit from riskier plays and a return to more stable investments.
The great thing about Apple (AAPL -0.91%) is that the company's massive size and huge profits make it a much more stable investment than smaller tech stocks, but it still has lots of exposure to exciting new technologies that will likely spur outsized growth for years to come.
For example, Apple could benefit from the metaverse, an online world where people play, work, and hang out using avatars. While it's still in its very early stages, an analyst asked Apple CEO Tim Cook about the company's potential in the metaverse on the company's recent earnings call, and Cook replied: "Right now, we have over 14,000 AR [augmented reality] kit apps in the App Store, which provide incredible AR experiences for millions of people today. And so we see a lot of potential in this space and are investing accordingly."
Apple's AR potential could be huge in the metaverse, as software and hardware will need to work well together -- something Apple excels at arranging -- to make the metaverse useful.
Aside from new growth areas like the metaverse, Apple is extremely profitable, with the company generating $34.6 billion in net income in the first quarter of fiscal 2022, and it enjoys impressive gross profit margins of nearly 44%.
3. Microsoft
As with Apple, some investors on Robinhood may be flocking to Microsoft (MSFT 1.69%) because of the company's massive size -- which has helped shield it from some of the market volatility that tech stocks have experienced lately.
But that doesn't mean that Microsoft is a slow-moving tech company that's seen better days. The company's shift to cloud computing services has proved a massive success, with Microsoft's Azure cloud computing service the second-most-popular public cloud behind Amazon's AWS.
In the most recent quarter, Microsoft's cloud revenue spiked 32% to $22.1 billion, and the company's diluted earnings popped 22% from the year-ago quarter.
But Microsoft isn't finished evolving just yet. The company recently made a bid to buy the video game maker Activision Blizzard for $69 billion. The deal, if it closes, will give Microsoft massively popular gaming titles including Call of Duty and Warcraft, and will make Microsoft the third-largest gaming company by revenue.
The acquisition will also give Microsoft the vast gaming community, totaling 400 million monthly active players, that Activision has built over the years. This matters for Microsoft, as the global gaming market could balloon into a $272 billion market by 2030, up from $98 billion in 2020.
Keep this in mind with any Robinhood stocks
When buying these stocks on Robinhood's platform -- or from any broker -- make sure you keep a long-term perspective on your investments. While meme stocks have gotten a lot of attention over the past couple of years, investors have a much better chance at building long-term wealth by buying stocks in strong companies -- like Nvidia, Apple, and Microsoft -- and holding them for at least three to five years.
