Market volatility over the past few months could lead investors to sell and take their winnings home before things get worse. But investing success means riding out the short-term waves and holding on to long-term winners. The S&P 500 (^GSPC 0.40%) has already made up whatever it lost in value earlier this year, and it would have been a shame to have sold at a low and missed out on the quick rebound.
If you can hold on for at least 20 years, you can choose excellent stocks and let them work their magic on your investments. Amazon (AMZN 0.45%), Shopify (SHOP 0.59%), MercadoLibre (MELI -0.22%), and SoFi Technologies (SOFI -1.24%) are four monster stocks that should reward you well over the next 20 years.
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1. Amazon: E-commerce and AI
Amazon is the leader in e-commerce and cloud computing, two massive growth industries. It has about 40% of the U.S. market share in e-commerce and about 30% of the global market for cloud computing. Both of these industries are growing organically, and Amazon is benefiting from these organic tailwinds.
Shoppers know Amazon as the king of e-commerce, and the company is heavily investing in keeping its lead there. But management has identified generative artificial intelligence (AI), primarily through the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud-computing business, as its main growth driver over the next few years.
Amazon said it would invest upwards of $100 billion in 2025 alone to keep building out this business, and it offers a huge assortment of features and tools to every size and stripe of client. AWS itself generated a 17% year-over-year increase in sales in the first quarter and has a $117 billion annualized revenue run rate. Management expects that with generative AI, that rate will increase.
"We thought AWS had the chance to ultimately be a multihundred-billion-dollar revenue run rate business," CEO Andy Jassy recently said of the pre-generative AI opportunity. "We now think it could be even larger."
Advertising and streaming continue to grow and add value to the business, and Amazon is investing in new concepts like Zoox autonomous vehicles and Project Kuiper broadband. It has a huge growth runway, and its stock should keep rewarding investors over many years.
2. Shopify: The other e-commerce giant
You won't see Shopify on any list of highest e-commerce sales because it doesn't sell products, it sells e-commerce services, like websites and payment processing. But its gross merchandise volume (GMV) is similar to Amazon's e-commerce sales, giving you a picture of Shopify's important and dominant position in the e-commerce space.
Shopify is also benefiting from the organic tailwinds of e-commerce growing as a percentage of retail sales. According to eMarketer, e-commerce accounted for 20.3% of retail sales in 2024, and that's expected to increase to 23% by 2027. Even that's still a small percentage, and with each percentage point translating into trillions of dollars, Shopify has a long growth runway.
It also continues to identify new ways to expand its market share and help its clients increase their sales. It has gone from a platform helping small businesses get online to targeting large businesses with individual e-commerce components. It offers a full-service omnichannel platform combining physical and digital retail, and it's making a bigger move into international, where there are several bigger players. International sales only accounted for 30% of the total in Q1, and that could be a huge growth driver in the coming years.
Patient investors should expect Shopify to be a top stock as it keeps growing and innovating for the foreseeable future.
3. MercadoLibre: The Latin American tech disruptor
MercadoLibre is similar to Amazon in that its core business is e-commerce, but it has dipped its toes into several other businesses that are driving fantastic growth. It operates in Latin America and offers a host of digital services in both e-commerce and financial technology. It consistently reports strong growth across metrics, such as a 40% increase in GMV year over year and a 72% increase in total payment volume in the 2025 first quarter.
The opportunity here is enormous because Latin America lags many other global regions in both e-commerce and digital penetration. In fact, 85% of sales are still offline, and some of its regions are underbanked, leading to a greater necessity for digital financial services.
Because its regions are still in their early innings in its industries, there are so many levers MercadoLibre can pull to move growth. It's doing so step by step, bringing in new, unique visitors to its ecosystem and generating higher purchase frequency. It's launching all sorts of innovative services, such as a new, free streaming initiative powered by its growing ad business.
MercadoLibre has a wide-open runway and tons of opportunities to grow its business and stock gains.
4. SoFi: The modern way to bank
SoFi is a digital financial disruptor offering all banking services online. It targets the young professional who's just starting their financial journey and appreciates SoFi's tech focus and easy-to-use interface.
Although its core business is lending, it has successfully expanded into a large array of financial services like bank accounts and investing tools. These are fee-based products that have low costs and are becoming incredibly profitable.
Even the lending business is bouncing back as interest rates go lower, and lending revenue increased 25% year over year in Q1. Financial services, though, more than doubled, and contribution profit increased 299%.
It's adding members at a high rate and generating higher engagement through cross-selling and upselling, and SoFi has a massive growth opportunity over the next 20 years as it gets closer to its ambition of becoming a top-10 U.S. bank.
