The Best Stocks to Invest $10,000 in Right Now

It might seem like a risky time to start investing in stocks. The S&P 500 is hovering near its record highs, and a broad range of unpredictable macro and geopolitical headwinds could derail that rally.

But if you plan to hold your stocks for at least a few years, you should tune out that noise and focus on high-quality plays that will keep growing regardless of those near-term challenges. Let's take a look at two of those resilient stocks -- Broadcom (NASDAQ: AVGO) and IBM (NYSE: IBM) -- and why they could turn a $10,000 investment into a lot more money.

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Broadcom

Broadcom produces a wide range of wireless chips, networking switches, optical equipment, and custom AI accelerator chips. It also expanded its infrastructure software business through several significant acquisitions -- including the cloud giant VMware -- over the past few years.

Most of Broadcom's recent growth was driven by its soaring sales of custom AI accelerator chips for hyperscalers, which can process AI inference tasks at a more cost-efficient rate than Nvidia's (NASDAQ: NVDA) general-purpose data center GPUs when deployed at scale.

In fiscal 2025 (which ended last November), Broadcom's AI chip sales rose 65% to $20 billion. That accounted for 31% of its top line and offset the slower growth of its non-AI chips and infrastructure software business. Its revenue and EPS grew 24% and 40%, respectively.

Broadcom expects the AI boom to continue as its non-AI businesses recover and grow again. Analysts expect its revenue and adjusted EPS to grow 52% and 51%, respectively, in fiscal 2026. Those are incredible growth rates for a stock trading at 32 times forward earnings.

IBM

IBM struggled with declining sales for a decade before its cloud chief, Arvind Krishna, took over as its CEO in 2020. Under Krishna, IBM spun off its slow-growth managed infrastructure services segment as Kyndryl (NYSE: KD) and expanded its hybrid cloud and AI businesses.

Instead of going head-to-head with public cloud giants like Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN), IBM used Red Hat (which it acquired in 2019) to launch more open-source applications that could process data flowing between on-site private clouds and public cloud platforms. That "hybrid" approach was appealing for large companies that weren't ready to migrate all of their data to the public cloud. That flexibility was also valuable for companies with multi-cloud deployments.

IBM's revenue and adjusted EPS grew 8% and 12%, respectively, in 2025. Analysts expect its revenue and adjusted EPS to rise another 5% and 7%, respectively, in 2026. Its stock could have plenty of upside, since it still looks reasonably valued at 21 times forward earnings.

Leo Sun has positions in Amazon. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Amazon, International Business Machines, Kyndryl, and Nvidia. The Motley Fool recommends Broadcom. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.