Tom Gardner's Five Stocks for the Long Term: Big Diversification, AI Research, and Caution

Motley Fool co-founder and CEO Tom Gardner shares five long-term stock ideas -- but first lays out three "outrageous" statements about how he believes investors should approach today's market.

Also in this video:

• Why Gardner thinks the average investor should own at least fifty stocks -- and how Peter Lynch's record supports it.
• How AI agents are reshaping investment research, and why a long-term orientation still wins.
• Five picks across the risk spectrum, from cautious to aggressive.

Five companies Gardner highlights for a diversified, long-term portfolio: Cisco Systems (CSCO +0.79%), MSCI (MSCI 1.77%), Kingstone Companies (KINS 1.48%), Marvell Technology (MRVL 1.89%), and BillionToOne (BLLN 3.27%).

A full transcript is below the video.

This video was published on July 7, 2026.

Hello, Foolish investors. I'm Tom Gardner, co-founder and CEO of The Motley Fool, and I'm here with five stocks for you to invest in for the long term. But before I present those five companies, I'm going to say three outrageous things about investing, and you can decide whether you agree.

The first is that after thirty years serving members around the world -- tens of millions of people working to make better investment decisions and to live smarter, happier, and richer lives -- we've concluded from all that data that it's a very good idea for the average individual investor to own at least fifty stocks.

I know there will be protests in the comments. Fifty stocks? That sounds like an index fund. Why would I ever do that? Well, there is so much disruption and so many questions about resiliency to AI. It's going to roll across every industry, and running a concentrated portfolio through that seems quite risky to me.

Fifty also seems like a lot until you remember that Peter Lynch held more than five hundred companies at Fidelity Magellan and delivered twenty-nine percent annualized returns for more than a decade. Plenty of very successful investors have owned hundreds of companies and still beaten the market. The reason is that there are forty thousand public companies in the world, and over any rolling 10-year period, about four thousand of them drive most of the upside. The majority will be mediocre, marginal, or outright losers -- it's the top ten percent that win. But out of forty thousand companies, that still leaves four thousand great businesses to choose from. And you can't find fifty? Of course you can.

The second outrageous thing is that we're moving into a completely new world of investing. The methodical way that fundamental and technical analysts look at one company after another is being transformed. The Motley Fool started in 1993, and we watched the shift from magazines, newspapers, and print subscriptions mailed once a quarter to a world that moved online -- real-time information for free, the ability to talk to investors around the world, and investment clubs that scaled to millions of people. That transformation changed the way we invested. This one is even more dramatic. We may be in just the second or third inning, but soon you'll have teams of AI agents doing research for you night and day, following more companies and understanding more twists and turns in the categories you care about most. If you don't have those systems working on your behalf, you're going to be at a disadvantage.

The Motley Fool is making substantial investments in building out AI scoring systems to find businesses that make sense as long-term investments. We're not competing on day trading or speculative high-frequency trading, and we're not here to predict where the market or Bitcoin will be in the next six months. We look out five, ten, and twenty years, because the vast majority of money made in the equity markets is made by business owners -- the CEOs and founders with large equity stakes. Every one I've met, whether Herb Kelleher at Southwest Airlines, Jim Sinegal at Costco, or Howard Schultz at Starbucks, and dozens more over these thirty years, none of them cared about their stock's performance over ninety days. When their stock was down twenty percent in a given year, that wasn't on their priority list of things needed to build a great business.

So a long-term-anchored, AI-powered scoring system is going to help us find the future Netflixes, Teslas, and Googles. Consider Nvidia: it has fallen fifty percent four times since our Rule Breakers team first recommended it at what is now $0.16 a share in 2005. The stock has risen thirteen hundred times in value since then, and it was never sold. That's why some Motley Fool members can say, "I put in five thousand dollars, and I have six million dollars in Nvidia." That's what a 1,300x return does -- and you don't get it by fishing for minnows day to day. It comes from buying companies and holding them for very long periods.

The last thing I'll say is that most of us probably feel we're in a pricey market. Remember that when large IPOs come public one after another, those are some of the best-informed businesses in history choosing this moment to sell equity to the public -- an indication that we're in richly priced territory. For that reason, three of these five recommendations carry a risk profile inside The Motley Fool of cautious, one is ranked moderate, and only one is scored aggressive. Tilting toward cautious and moderate makes sense right now.

The first recommendation is the long-standing Cisco Systems. This was the backbone of the internet twenty-five years ago; the market peaked and the stock never really came back. But here it is, providing networking equipment to connect data centers, with a healthy security business growing out of its Splunk acquisition. It has thirteen billion dollars in free cash flow and double-digit return on assets -- very efficient with its capital. Leadership has shown it can sit at the center of the most dramatic technical transformations in history while running a disciplined financial story. We first recommended it in Hidden Gems at forty-nine dollars in 2024; the stock's now at one hundred twenty. I think we can get twelve to fourteen percent annualized from Cisco over the next five years.

The second company, also cautious, is MSCI. It provides global benchmarks for institutional investors -- if you run an ETF or fund and need an index to measure your performance against, MSCI creates those indexes, and it builds the underlying index for many index funds too. Institutions pay on a subscription basis, so it's recurring, highly profitable revenue, with over a billion dollars in free cash flow and unbelievable rates of return on invested capital. A very well-managed business.

The third company is one probably no one here has heard of: a very small homeowners insurance company called Kingstone Companies. In 2019, Merrill Golden joined as chief operating officer, and about four years later the succession plan advanced and she became CEO. She fixed a troubled, nearly broken insurer whose stock had fallen below a dollar a share; it's now around fifteen dollars -- an amazing return over just two and a half years. The company now runs an eighty-eight percent combined ratio, meaning it earns a twelve percent profit margin on the contracts it writes, mostly homeowners insurance in New York, but it's now expanding into Connecticut and, most importantly, California, where many insurers are pulling back from wildfire risk. Kingstone is stepping in because it believes it can price that risk correctly. It's a tiny company and the stock could be volatile, but it's cautiously rated because it's a very disciplined insurer with a CEO doing an outstanding job.

Those first three -- Cisco, MSCI, and Kingstone -- are all cautious, a reminder that The Motley Fool believes we should always be investing in any market environment. When stocks collapse and the S&P 500 falls thirty percent, which happens about once a decade, we have to be prepared. That's often when we look for aggressive positions in great growth businesses whose stocks have been discarded and are down sixty percent even though their prospects look very bright. When markets are richly priced, we prefer caution -- which is why the first three here are cautious.

Let's finish with a moderate and an aggressive idea. My moderate pick is Marvell Technology. Data has to move very quickly between servers and data centers, and that requires custom chips. Think of Nvidia's GPUs as the engine and Marvell's chips as the highways and tunnels. Within a couple of years, Marvell will have six billion dollars in free cash flow. Jensen Huang recently said he believes Marvell could be the next trillion-dollar company; it's capitalized at two hundred fifty billion today, so that would mean a 4x. My belief is that takes a decade -- but if Jensen Huang thinks it'll take less, I'm betting on Jensen Huang.

The fifth and final recommendation is an aggressive classification: BillionToOne. It sounds aggressive, doesn't it? You'd think you'd need some obnoxious, narcissistic, risk-taking founder to name a company BillionToOne. But the name comes from having the most advanced genetic testing for prenatal and oncology testing -- effectively looking for a tiny signal among three billion base pairs in DNA, trying to find the one molecule that flags a problem so a patient can get treatment. The two founders were Princeton-trained scientists with deep engineering backgrounds. It's a tactically advanced and deeply mission-driven business. If you read about the company and its founders, you're going to want to own shares -- even one or three shares just to get started. It usually doesn't matter in the long term how much money you start with; it's the discipline you bring to the portfolio you're building.

We're in a richly priced market, and it will be a volatile one. But if you tilt toward some cautious investments and build a well-rounded fifty-plus-stock portfolio, I think you'll be very happy with your Foolish returns. Thank you for entertaining these ideas. I look forward to your comments below, and of course we always hope you'll like and subscribe to every Motley Fool video you watch. We look forward to serving you and helping you live a smarter, happier, and richer life for many decades to come. Fool on.