$3,000 Invested in These 3 Top Stocks Could Make You Rich in 10 Years

Would you like to become rich in a short period of time? There are a few ways of doing so. For instance, pop vocalists are generally wealthy. Professional athletes do pretty well, too. Then there's the lottery.

If singing or professional sports or a lottery jackpot just aren't in your plausible future, though, for most people, the next-best option is the stock market. While a $3,000 investment probably won't make you a millionaire in the next 10 years, there is a handful of stocks that could turn that relatively small amount into a much bigger sum of money within a decade. Here's a rundown of three such prospects.

Novo Nordisk

Investors should always be wary of market manias; many of them unexpectedly fizzle out with no warning. The cannabis craze of 2018 comes to mind, as does 2013's 3D printing frenzy. Then there's the dot-com meltdown of 2000. Sometimes these big, sweeping rallies end up being justified. Often, however, they don't.

Enter Novo Nordisk (NVO 0.84%).

If you've kept your finger on the pulse of the pharmaceutical market this year, then you know one of its top themes of 2023 has been weight-loss drugs. Eli Lilly's Zepbound was just approved by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration for this purpose, joining Novo Nordisk's Wegovy, which was approved by the FDA for the same purpose back in 2021. Demand for Wegovy was already robust, but the addition of a competing product seems to have stoked bullish interest in both. Lilly's stock is up 90% from March's bottom, while Novo Nordisk shares have more than doubled in value from last year's low.

These gains and their backstory certainly have some of the hallmarks of a fad, leaving them seemingly vulnerable to a sizable pullback. And that may well be what's in the cards.

This may be one of those cases, however, where the eventual results could live up to the current hype. Goldman Sachs believes the anti-obesity drug market could become a $100 billion market as soon as 2030, led by the likes of Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly. That's 16 times bigger than the market is right now. Both companies are positioned to benefit from this impending growth. But being the first to market and therefore better established, Novo is arguably the better pick of the two. Its strong position in the diabetes care space -- a market that Precedence Research expects to grow at an annualized pace of 6.7% through 2032 -- only bolsters its bullish argument.

Boeing

There's no denying The Boeing Company (BA 0.25%) has had a rough go of things lately. First it was design problems for its once-highly lauded 737 Max. Then the COVID-19 pandemic took hold, crimping air travel and therefore crimping demand for new aircraft. A manufacturing defect discovered on some of its new 787 passenger jets surfaced in the meantime.

It looks bad, and it is. These aren't insurmountable problems, though, even if the market is still largely treating them as if they are; shares are priced more or less where they were in early 2020.

The evidence of impending bullishness? It starts with last quarter's results. Although still in the red, Boeing's top line was up 13% year over year for the three-month stretch ending in September, cutting into its losses. Airlines are clearly buying more of its planes now.

And they intend to keep doing so. With the addition of 841 net new aircraft orders being placed this year, Boeing's backlog of ordered but undelivered aircraft now stands at a multiyear high of 5,866. That's nearly $500 billion worth of business already lined up just waiting to be delivered and then booked.

Then there's the bigger driver of Boeing's long-term growth...sheer demand.

In simplest terms, the world's air travel business has plenty of runway left to continue growing. With costs coming down and new airports being built, Boeing believes the world's airlines will need to purchase more than 42,000 new passenger jets between now and 2042. For perspective, numbers from industry research outfit Oliver Wyman suggest there are around 27,400 commercial aircraft in use right now. That's well short of the current need, and bear in mind that most of the jets now actively used in airline fleets will be retired between now and then.

There are competing aircraft manufacturers. The world will need all of them for the next couple of decades, however, including Boeing.

Palantir Technologies

Finally, add Palantir Technologies (PLTR 3.73%) to your list of stocks that could make you relatively rich(er) over the course of the coming 10 years.

Palantir is an artificial intelligence company. Specifically, it provides its customers with a means of turning mountains of digital data into actionable information. Its Foundry platform, for instance, can help biopharma companies optimize a clinical trial of a drug. Palantir's Apollo allows software companies to roll out complicated products sold to the federal government, which has strict security requirements.

It's an important bridge between AI's theoretical capabilities and actually doing something practical -- and marketable -- with artificial intelligence.

And the company's results confirm this idea. Last quarter's top line of $558 million was up 17% year over year, and guidance of around $600 million worth of revenue for the quarter currently underway is 18% better than the prior-year's top line. Next year's growth rate should be even stronger. More important, this already-profitable company's bottom line is soaring now. Last quarter's adjusted per-share profit of $0.07 puts the company on pace for a full-year profit of $0.25, en route to an expected $0.29 per share for 2024.

This is still just the beginning, however. Now that AI is being proven useful in real-world settings, Precedence Research expects the annual AI software market to swell from around $170 billion this year to more than $1 trillion in 2023. That's a compounded annual growth rate of nearly 23%.

Palantir Technologies is well positioned to capture at least its fair share of this growth.