3 Growth Stocks to Buy and Hold Forever

Finding a new growth stock for your portfolio unusually isn't too tough of a task; there's always something out there of interest. Finding one you can feel good about buying and holding "forever," however, is a different story.

The underlying company must not only be built to last but be capable of evolving and adapting as its industry demands it to.

With this requirement in mind, here's a closer look at three growth stocks you can buy today with plans holding on to them forever. In no particular order...

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1. Shopify

For the record, while Shopify's (NASDAQ: SHOP) 2025 revenue growth of 30% may have been in line with its norms since launching in 2006, it's not a pace that can be sustained forever. Eventually, the company will run out of places and ways to expand its reach.

That time is decades down the road, though, long enough for you not to worry about it. In the meantime, more scale ultimately means wider profit margins, and profit growth that outpaces its top-line growth.

If you're not familiar with it, Shopify helps brands and merchants build and manage their own e-commerce sites.

Established mostly to be a diametrical-opposite alternative to Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN), the owners of the millions of stores using its technology love that they control the entire customer experience, allowing them to tell their story and develop an authentic relationship with consumers. This is in sharp contrast with using Amazon as a sales platform, where sellers are competing side-by-side with countless other sellers (often including Amazon itself) in a very crowded digital space. That's why Shopify's platform facilitated the sale of $378 billion worth of goods and services last year, up more than 29% year over year to extend a well-established trend -- this is how the world increasingly wants to do business online.

It's still just the beginning, though. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that e-commerce currently only accounts for about 18% of the country's retail spending. While certainly a wide swath of that business will never move online (think refrigerated groceries, or in cases where a trip to a brick-and-mortar stores is an enjoyable part of the experience itself), that still leaves hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of consumer spending up for grabs. And that's just domestically. The same dynamic applies internationally too, where Shopify saw 36% grow last year.

To this end, Precedence Research believes the worldwide e-commerce industry is poised to grow at an average annualized rate of more than 14% through 2035.It's just a matter of how. Shopify is positioned to play a major role in the "how."

2. Palo Alto Networks

If you think computer hacking, data breaches, and identify theft are finally being curbed because you're hearing less about them, think again. The cybercrime industry is as busy as it's ever been. The Identity Theft Resource Center reports data breaches reached a record-breaking count of 3,322 last year alone, up 5% from 2024's levels, and 79% higher than 2020's number. You've just not heard as much about the matter in the recent past because the news media is more interested in newer stories.

Investors, on the other hand, are predominantly interested in making money, and there's still plenty of opportunity to be tapped in this business. An outlook from Straits Research expects the cybersecurity market to grow from last year's $280 billion to $593 billion by 2033, although as long as the world uses computers, the need for digital defense is never going to go away. Indeed, it's only apt to perpetually grow now that the artificial intelligence cat is out of the bag, so to speak.

As cybersecurity solutions provider CrowdStrike's CEO George Kurtz recently put it, the advent of AI is only driving "the democratization of cybercrime."

CrowdStrike may not be the best way to make a permanent investment in the cybersecurity business, however. Industry titan Palo Alto Networks (NASDAQ: PANW) is arguably the better bet.

While simply being the biggest name in any industry isn't enough of a reason for investors to own a piece of it, at least within the cybersecurity business, more size means more resources to develop superior solutions, like its Palo Alto's Prisma Cloud platform that seamlessly combines threat detection, container security, identity management, workload protection, and a firewall, and more. Technology consulting and industry research outfit Gartner also rates Palo Alto as one of the very best service providers within the secure access service edge (SASE) market, underscoring the benefit of its sheer size.

3. Amazon

Finally, add the aforementioned Amazon to the list of growth stocks you can buy and hold forever.

The company doesn't need much in the way of introduction or explanation. Amazon is of course the OG e-commerce name. It's also since become the world's biggest cloud computing name (at least as measured by revenue).

But that's not the reason this company is such a fantastic "forever" investment. Rather, Amazon is a great permanent holding because change and evolution have been woven into its corporate ethos since its infancy. This has allowed the company to adapt to an ever-changing market environment in ways that ensure it's able to continue growing.

Take Amazon Prime as an example. When it first debuted back in 2005, the idea of subscription-based access to a perk like free shipping of online orders was unheard of. It's since become a norm now mirrored by rival Walmart.

Amazon also rethought how to best monetize its massive e-commerce platform. As it turns out, it's more profitable as an advertising medium than as an online shopping middleman. Last year, Amazon collected nearly $69 billion worth of high-margin ad revenue, up 22% from 2024's tally. Even Amazon Web Services itself didn't exist when the company founded as on online bookseller back in 1995. AWS has only become Amazon's single-biggest source of profits since launching in 2006.

The point is, while it seems like Amazon could eventually run out of room to expand its e-commerce presence or its cloud computing business, there's a whole universe of new opportunity it could embrace, maybe even including brick-and-mortar retail or robotaxis.

James Brumley has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Amazon, CrowdStrike, Shopify, and Walmart. The Motley Fool recommends Gartner and Palo Alto Networks. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.