Many people think that making money in the U.S. stock market is entirely about having good judgment.

Actually, the reason for losing money is very simple: you bought the right stocks but didn't hold on.
In 2020, many people bought Apple and Microsoft, but when the market pulled back, they sold out, and later those gains had nothing to do with them.
Almost everyone who makes big money in the U.S. stock market has only done one thing: found stocks worth holding long-term, bought them, and then did nothing.
The key question here is: what kind of stocks are called "worthy of holding long-term"?
My standard is quite simple: their business must be increasingly profitable, not relying on subsidies; the market they operate in is still growing; they have pricing power, allowing them to pass costs onto customers.
The simplest answer is just two ETFs.
The Nasdaq 100, ticker Q, has an annualized return of about 19.5% over the past 10 years.
The S&P 500, ticker VOO, has an annualized return of about 14.4%.
These two indices don’t require stock picking or timing; just hold them.
If you want to add a few individual stocks beyond ETFs, here are some that have been tested through complete bull and bear cycles:
Apple’s total return over the past 10 years is 938%, with the iPhone plus services locking in users and having strong pricing power, with a moat that has hardly changed in 10 years.
Microsoft’s stock price has increased 200% over the past 5 years, with Azure cloud services plus Office subscriptions providing stable cash flow that’s enviable.
NVIDIA’s total return over the past 10 years is nearly 18,000%.
As a core supplier of AI computing infrastructure, it will have short-term fluctuations, but the long-term logic shows no signs of a turning point.
For these stocks, after buying, the only question you need to answer is: can you hold on for 10 years?