It's hard to predict the future, but it's still fun to try sometimes.
In this clip from "Ask Us Anything" on Motley Fool Live, recorded on March 30, Motley Fool contributor Demitri Kalogeropoulos names the stock he thinks has the best chance of being even stronger in 20 years than it is now.
Demitri Kalogeropoulos: It made me think McDonald's (MCD 0.05%) because that's a stock I would think of as something in 20 years, they might not be a fine dining five-star restaurant, but I think they're going to be making way more money than they are right now and they're going to be serving a lot more customers than they have been. If you just look at some of their numbers, this past year's sales rose at about 11%, two-year rates compared to before the pandemic if you smooth that out. They won through the pandemic and you just look at the breadth of different selling environments that McDonald's has had to deal with all the disruptions, like the Chipotle, that fast-casual movement that was threatening a lot of their business with all this fresh ingredients and like higher production scale like restaurant stuff.
McDonald's is flexible and they adjusted their menu and they've done this dozens of time.s I like to see that in a company that can reinvent itself frequently. Just in the past 15 years or so, McDonald's has had to do that on a large scale several times and it's so impressive to see them find a way to dominate this massive market every time with every shift like that. Recently, they had to move everything toward digital delivery and pickup. Now having that drive-thru flexibility, you see Chipotle for example right now moving more into that, most restaurants are moving into that drive-thru space, which McDonald's dominates as well. I could see that just being a really popular business still when the burger, the Big Mac hits, I think it's 50 years old now already, so that would be its 70 year anniversary in 20 years.
