ARK Invest CEO Cathie Woods likes plenty of stocks that could easily be bought and held for a decade or longer -- although her average holding period hasn't been anywhere near as long. Here's a rundown of three of her and her team's picks that would make for great 10-year, leave-'em-alone holdings for most growth investors' portfolios.
1. Tesla
Tesla (TSLA -3.02%), the world's biggest seller of electric vehicles (EVs), can be credited with bringing EVs into the mainstream.
Image source: Getty Images.
Yes, the company is finally facing serious competition. Its founder Elon Musk is also aiming to acquire social media site Twitter, a development that has spurred drama, potential distraction, and questions about whether the deal will actually happen. Tesla shares certainly won't win any value awards, either, priced at 60 times this year's projected per-share earnings, and 47 times next year's expected bottom line.
It just doesn't matter in a 10-year time frame, though. You not only have to be willing to pay up for quality long-term prospects, but you should probably expect to do so.
Besides, while newcomers pose a threat to its market share, Tesla is still the premier name in the business, and there's going to be plenty of business to go around. The U.S. Energy Information Administration believes the number of EVs traveling the world's roads will swell from 2020's roughly 9 million in 2020 to 672 million by 2050. Tesla wouldn't even have to capture the majority of that market growth to end that time period much bigger than it started it.
2. DraftKings
DraftKings (DKNG 2.92%) operates at the intersection of fantasy sports and increasingly widespread legal sports-based gambling.
DraftKings was initially a platform for picking winners -- and winning prizes. But the expansion of sportsbooks and new kinds of bets on professional sports events have really opened the door for app-based sports gambling. Last year's revenue of $1.3 billion more than doubled 2020's top line of $614 million, which itself improved 2019's revenue of $431 million by nearly 50%.
Yes, the pandemic helped, although not as much as you might think; most of that growth took place after the resumption of professional sports.
Rather, the key growth driver here has been the inevitable rise of the industry following the Supreme Court's 2018 decision to end a federal ban on sports betting. The ruling kicked the matter back to individual states, and as of now about half of them have legalized it in one fashion or another. More are on the way, too.
Boosting DraftKing's share of this organic market growth are partnerships with professional sports teams themselves. Along with FanDuel, DraftKings is now the official sports betting partner of the NBA, as well as the official daily fantasy sports partner of the Boston Bruins professional hockey team. And these are just a sampling of such partnerships.
As for what long-term investors have to look forward to, chew on this: ARK Invest believes the annual U.S. sports betting market will grow from around $10 billion now to $37 billion by 2025. Research outfit Technavio expects the global sports gambling market to grow an average of 10% per year through 2025 until it's $100 billion bigger than 2020's tally. No matter how you slice it, that's a lot of opportunities.
3. Adyen
Finally, add Adyen (ADYY.F -1.33%) to your list of Cathie Wood stocks to consider buying and holding for the next 10 years.
Don't let the over-the-counter (OTC) listing fool you. This isn't some penny stock that can't qualify for a listing because it might not be here tomorrow. Adyen has a $48 billion market cap, and generated about $1 billion in revenue last year, up 46% year over year.
The Netherlands-based company simply hasn't sought out an exchange listing in the United States because doing so can be costly and complicated, and offers no particular advantage to the company in question. Plenty of quality foreign companies are only traded in the United States on an OTC basis, including Nestle and Volkswagen.
Fine, but what is Adyen? It most closely compares to PayPal Holdings. Indeed, in many places outside of North America -- and particularly in Europe -- Adyen is the go-to digital payments name, much like PayPal is here. Market researcher Slintel estimates that Adyen's 22% share of the global digital payment-processing market is second only to PayPal's 31%, in fact, and the company is working to close that narrow gap. Just last week, Adyen expanded its partnership to buy now, pay later service Afterpay. And last month, Japan's Amazon added Adyen as a payment option for its shoppers.
There's not as much information for investors available for Adyen as there typically is for U.S. exchange-listed equities. There's enough, however, to appreciate that PayPal doesn't dominate every market all over the world the way it seems to here.
