3 Unstoppable Stocks You Can Buy and Hold for the Rest of Your Life

If you want stocks that you can buy and hold for not only years, but potentially the rest of your life, it's important to consider businesses that have massive growth opportunities. These are the types of companies that generate significant profits, are leaders within their respective industries, and are likely to remain dominant for years -- potentially decades.

Whether you're starting out and building your portfolio or just want some quality investments to hang on to, I have some great options for you to consider. Three stocks that look unstoppable and you should be able to safely hang on to for decades are Eli Lilly (NYSE: LLY), Walmart (NYSE: WMT), and Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG) (NASDAQ: GOOGL). Here's why they can be no-brainer buys for the long haul.

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Eli Lilly

Eli Lilly has been a growth machine over the years, relying on a combination of acquisitions and in-house development to expand its operations. Today, the big excitement around the business is due to its GLP-1 drugs, Zepbound and Mounjaro, with the former approved for weight loss and the latter approved for diabetes.

And while those are incredibly promising drugs, the company isn't just relying on those treatments for its growth. Last year, the Food and Drug Administration also approved Kisunla, the company's treatment for early Alzheimer's, another blockbuster drug that can bolster its revenue and profit in the future.

The company recently announced plans to build Lilly Medicine Foundry, a center focused on researching new drugs and producing medications more efficiently. It's a $4.5 billion investment that can help advance its pipeline at a greater scale over the years.

Eli Lilly has generated an operating profit of just under $15 billion over the trailing 12 months on revenue totaling $41 billion. With impressive margins and some fantastic long-term growth potential, this can be a solid investment to buy and hold.

Walmart

Big-box retailer Walmart is another solid stock that likely isn't slowing down anytime soon. Its stores are one-stop shops for many consumers, but Walmart has been showing an appetite for more growth than simply expanding its store count.

It has significant opportunities in online retail and launched Walmart+ in 2020 in a bid to cater to customers who want free delivery along with other perks (e.g. streaming, discounts). Last year, it also acquired TV-maker Vizio in a move to help grow its advertising business, Walmart Connect.

The company is already a beast, generating more than $670 billion in sales over the trailing 12 months. While its profit margins aren't huge at just under 3%, with its volume, the low-cost leader is in an excellent position to grow its bottom line in the long run given its plentiful growth opportunities.

Alphabet

Tech company Alphabet rounds out this list of promising growth stocks. What I've always loved about it is that it has two fantastic assets in its search engine, Google, and its videostreaming service, YouTube. Both are platforms that attract a lot of advertisers and traffic, which can drive a ton of growth for the foreseeable future.

Alphabet may have gotten off to a bumpy start in the chatbot wars, but Gemini is proving it can be a formidable rival to OpenAI's ChatGPT. The advantage Alphabet has is that it integrates Gemini right into search queries so whether someone wants to utilize AI or just do a normal query, it can give users the best of both worlds.

Google's cloud business also presents a fantastic growth opportunity, as does the potential for the tech company to make its own chips -- which Apple has used to train its AI models.

Alphabet is hugely profitable, and it gushes cash; over the past four quarters its free cash flow has totaled nearly $56 billion. With plenty of resources to reinvest into its operations, this is another business that looks unstoppable.

Should you invest $1,000 in Eli Lilly right now?

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Suzanne Frey, an executive at Alphabet, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. David Jagielski has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Apple, and Walmart. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.