3 Stocks to Buy and Hold for the Next 50 Years

To that end, investors with enough discipline (and time) to sit tight for the next 50 years may want to consider stepping into Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), American Water Works Company (NYSE: AWK), and Verizon Communications (NYSE: VZ) sooner rather than later. A decade ago, software giant Microsoft looked like a has-been. It wasn't a player in the then-young smartphone market, free office productivity software was a threat to an important piece of its business, the personal computer market was peaking, and most of the world was still trying to figure out exactly what the term "cloud computing" even meant.