Given enough time, most stocks climb higher. But not all stocks dish out the same sort of gains. While the average ticker rises an average of about 10% per year, a handful of names have quadrupled or even quintupled that pace over the course of just the past few years.
Here's a rundown of three of the biggest winners of the current bull market that technically began all the way back in the middle of 2009. The early 2020 pandemic sell-off was just a big but short-lived blip along the way. Let's take a look at how they did it and whether they can keep up the pace.
1. UnitedHealth Group
10-year stock price gain: 728%
That's right. While the health insurance industry doesn't look or feel like a growth sector, UnitedHealth Group (UNH 0.19%) has somehow made it one. Not only has the stock's price soared since mid-2012, but the company's annualized top line has grown just as much, from a little more than $100 billion per year in 2012 to nearly $300 billion now. Operating income has improved just as impressively.
Image source: Getty Images.
The health insurance market hasn't grown that much during that time, to be clear -- at least not when measured by the amount of care that consumers collectively need. Rather, this growth reflects the combination of soaring healthcare costs, inefficiencies in the delivery of care, and the inevitable subsequent consolidation of the industry's fragmented pieces. The company purchased DaVita Medical Group back in 2019, for instance, and UnitedHealth's Optum unit is still working to acquire Change Healthcare.
Bringing more related services under the same umbrella not only makes it easier to provide insurance-covered care to people that need it, but ultimately lowers administrative costs.
2. MarketAxess Holdings
10-year stock price gain: 872%
It's not a household name, but there's a good chance you or someone in your household benefits from the service that MarketAxess Holdings (MKTX -0.16%) offers.
In short, MarketAxess provides bond market data. Though usually geared for (and delivered to) institutional traders and brokers, it's possible you've used the company's information to navigate and then trade fixed income instruments. And it's not just pricing data. Overall bond trading activity, cost analysis, and automated trade execution are just some of the services in its repertoire.
And the timing of these tools' availability couldn't be better. MarketAxess reports that the average daily trading volume reached a record of $37.5 billion worth of bonds in the first quarter of this year, up 22% year over year thanks to the sheer growth of the fixed income market itself. It's pretty clear that investors of all sorts increasingly want the sort of bond market tools they can use within the stock trading world.
3. Amazon
10-year stock price gain: 1,202%
Finally, is it any real surprise Amazon (AMZN -1.39%) tops the list of the market's top gainers for the past 10 years with a whopping 1,202% run-up? It is, after all, North America's (and the western hemisphere's) No. 1 destination for online shopping.
The funny thing is, the latest leg of this long-term rally has little to do with the company's consumer-facing e-commerce operation; its online shopping operation has been and remains barely profitable, slipping into the red during the first quarter of this year thanks to rising freight, supply, and personnel costs.
Rather, the only reason Amazon was able to generate operating income of $3.7 billion during the three-month stretch ending in March was Amazon Web Services' $6.5 billion contribution to the operating bottom line. That's 56% better than AWS's operating income from the same quarter a year earlier. The numbers underscore the notion that cloud computing, rather than e-commerce, is the company's future workhorse.
Where to from here?
Great, but as the cliched fine print warns us, past performance is no guarantee of future results. Is there any chance these three stocks will dish out these kinds of gains again between now and the middle of 2032?
It's possible, though not likely -- and certainly not likely enough to count on if you need your portfolio to be much, much bigger a decade from now. Plenty of investors knew these were investment-worthy names back in 2012, but nobody saw these sorts of rallies taking shape for any of these stocks. These are the sorts of rallies you just can't predict.
That doesn't mean they're still not worth owning now, though. Even if they only dish out half or even a mere third of the gains driven over the course of the past 10 years, that's still better than the gains most stocks will muster during this time. And given that little about any of their businesses has changed in the meantime -- except for the addition of Amazon's more fruitful cloud computing operation -- there's no reason to believe the next 10 years won't at least be good ones for all three of these companies.
