If you've grown weary of forever chasing the next hot growth stock and keeping constant tabs on your holdings, you're not alone. "Active" investing can get real tiresome real fast.
Fortunately, you don't have to settle for subpar results in exchange for a passive, less-involved approach. There are plenty of great growth stocks you can step into and sit on for a decade or more, only checking on them every now and then. In fact, most of these tickers require a long-term mindset if you want to get the most out of them. Here are three such growth stocks to consider.
Shopify
Amazon may be the undisputed king of e-commerce. However, there's a downside to being willing to sell anyone virtually anything from your own inventory as well as via a few million third-party sellers: Things can get messy, requiring restrictive guidelines that limit legitimate sellers' businesses. Many of these sellers are now looking for less cumbersome ways to promote their goods online, and they're finding Shopify (SHOP 0.14%) does the job perfectly.
Image source: Getty Images.
Simply put, Shopify empowers small businesses by allowing them to establish their own online shops their way, entirely outside of Amazon's purview. Shopify no longer discloses exactly how many sellers use its platform, other than proclaiming it's "millions of merchants." It does say, though, that its tech has facilitated more than $450 billion in sales to date -- $54.1 billion of which were made during the fourth quarter of 2021 alone. That's 31% more business than Shopify's online shopping services handled in the same quarter a year earlier.
The thing is, Shopify has only scratched the surface of being the un-Amazon. The analyst community is calling for top-line growth of nearly 31% this year, which should accelerate to nearly 32% next year.
MercadoLibre
Speaking of Amazon, you may have heard MercadoLibre (MELI -1.98%) called the Amazon of Latin America. But the description doesn't do the company justice. While it is in many regards comparable to Amazon, it also mirrors eBay and PayPal. Online auctions and digital payments are also in its wheelhouse in addition to outright e-commerce. It just offers these services in a mostly underserved South and Central America.
And it's a powerhouse to be sure. In countries where it offers its services, MercadoLibre controls an average of about one-third of those markets, leveraging this reach to generate a record-breaking $2.1 billion in revenue during the final quarter of last year. That's a 74% year-over-year improvement.
A long-term stake in MercadoLibre isn't as much an investment in this particular company, however, as it is a play on a continent's digital coming-of-age.
In simplest terms, Latin America is now where North America was 15 years ago. While cellphones are common, the use of smartphones in South and Central America is still picking up steam. The Groupe Speciale Mobile Association, or GSMA, which helps the region's mobile carriers manage their collective operations, estimates 57% of South America's population was using the mobile internet as of 2020 en route to 64% by 2025.
Smartphone adoption itself is projected to swell from 72% to 81% during that same time. Not only is MercadoLibre's addressable market getting bigger, existing South American users of smartphones (and the mobile internet access they offer) will continue to get comfortable with all sorts of new e-commerce offerings.
Apple
Finally, add Apple (AAPL -0.57%) to your list of growth stocks you can feel good about buying and holding for the next 10 years or longer. It's a predictable, on-the-nose pick to be sure. That's the upshot, however, of being the biggest and most profitable company on the planet.
Don't misunderstand. There will come a time when Apple's flagship iPhone business will be incapable of generating half of the company's revenue the way it does right now. While only a little over one billion of the more than seven billion people on the planet are iPhone users, not everybody in the world needs -- or even wants -- an iPhone, or even a smartphone.
Meanwhile, other smartphone makers are starting to make mobile devices that can legitimately compete with the iPhone's superior performance, and these competitors' phones are often offered at a fraction of the typical iPhone's price, too.
The point in time when this headwind will become a serious problem for Apple, though, is many, many years down the road, if it ever becomes a true problem at all. In the meantime, the company continues to make inroads with apps and other digital content. These services may only account for about 20% of the company's top line, but in that this is very high-margin revenue, digital goods and services actually make up about a third of Apple's operating profits. The growth of this profit contribution will increase at a faster clip as the company's services arm continues to swell over the course of the coming 10 years.
