Investors are always looking at potential buying opportunities that could be big winners over time. A good place to find these types of situations is to identify previous winners. This can help you narrow down your list of places to park your capital.
Looking at history, there are some dominant companies today that have compounded shareholder capital in a remarkable fashion. In fact, here are three stocks that have turned a $1,000 initial investment into $1 million (or more).
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Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) is first on this list. Since its initial public offering (IPO) in May 1997, the business has seen its shares soar 222,600% (as of Dec. 5). That gain turned $1,000 into more than $2.2 million today.
The company started out disrupting the retail sector, leading to its current leading position in the e-commerce niche. Nearly 38% of all spending online in the U.S. happens on Amazon.com, indicative of the business’s dominance.
However, Amazon benefits from other powerful secular trends. Its cloud platform, Amazon Web Services, has a leading market share, raking in trailing-12-month revenue of $103 billion. The company also has a popular streaming service in Prime Video, and a large presence in digital advertising.
Amazon is winning over investors by focusing more on the bottom line. During the three-month period that ended Sept. 30, it generated $17.4 billion in operating income, which was up 55% year over year. The leadership team has focused relentlessly on cost cuts and operational efficiency. Wall Street analysts see operating income soaring at a yearly rate of 38.9% between 2023 and 2026.
Shares might be at all-time highs, but investors are still being presented with a nice buying opportunity. The current forward price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio of 43.1 is reasonable, given the company’s impressive earnings trajectory.
With a current market cap of just under $3.7 trillion, Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) has long been the world’s most valuable company. This has come about thanks to a stock that has generated a 245,800% total return since December 1980, turning $1,000 into just under $2.5 million right now.
Apple has become a consumer electronics juggernaut by providing its users with beautifully designed hardware products that come equipped with the company’s internal software capabilities. Innovation has been key to Apple’s success, as it’s developed extremely popular products over the years, like the iPod, iPhone, iPad, MacBook, Watch, and AirPods.
