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10 Unrivaled Stocks to Buy for the Next Decade

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Wall Street had its worst day since April 2025 last Thursday. The Nasdaq Composite fell 5.5%, the S&P 500 dropped 4.4%, and the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index plunged 12.2%.

Two worries drove the selling. Investors doubt that heavy spending on artificial intelligence will pay off, and candidates who ran against data center expansion won races in Texas and Georgia in the midterm elections. Mark Hackett, chief market strategist at Nationwide, told Reuters that chip stocks are a volatile, cyclical group in which “when sentiment shifts, the reactions are intense.” Hedge funds, he added, had been selling for weeks.

Why a Wide Moat Matters When Sentiment Turns

A rout like that tests which businesses can protect their profits when investors lose their nerve. An economic moat is a company’s lasting edge over its rivals, the kind that guards its market share and earnings.

Moats come in several forms. A company can be the low-cost producer, own a brand that lets it charge more, or hold patents and licenses that keep copycats out. Scale helps, because large producers spread their costs over more units. High switching costs make customers think twice before moving to a rival. What matters most is how long the advantage lasts and how much it depends on the people running the company.

You might also be interested in our ranking of the 10 Best Semiconductor Stocks to Buy for the Next Decade, the group that took the heaviest hit.

Why the Debate Over AI Spending Is Not Settled

Stocks have bounced since. The S&P 500 and the Nasdaq each climbed more than 1% on Wednesday, and the semiconductor index jumped 7%. Equities have whipsawed all week, though, as worries about slower data center deployment and higher interest rates compete with the urge to buy the dip, Reuters reported.

Brokerages including Morgan Stanley and UBS have called the rout overdone. Morgan Stanley said the likely effect is a push-out of some data center projects from 2028 to 2029, not a derailing of the spending boom. Goldman Sachs estimates that about 45% of planned US data center capacity faces possible restrictions. Our list of the 10 Fastest-Growing AI Stocks to Buy Now covers more of the names caught up in that debate.

Strategists at Yardeni Research wrote in a Friday note that the backlash against data centers and other constraints are “speed bumps, not roadblocks.” They argue that Wall Street is pricing in the roadblocks. Bank of America Global Research analysts said investors bought into last week’s selloff, with institutional clients leading the purchases.

Our Methodology

To pick the stocks for this list, we searched financial news sites, Reddit, X, investing forums and thematic ETFs built around wide-moat companies, looking for businesses with durable competitive advantages. From the stocks that came up most often, we selected the 10 with the largest market caps and ranked them in ascending order of average upside potential, based on analysts’ average price target, as of November 11, 2026. We also list each stock’s number of hedge fund holders as of Q2 2026, from our database of 1,006 hedge funds.

At Insider Monkey, we are obsessed with what hedge funds do. The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Insider Monkey’s quarterly newsletter strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 612% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 375 percentage points (see more details here).

10 Unrivaled Stocks to Buy for the Next Decade

10. Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL)

Market Cap: $5.06 trillion

Average Upside Potential: -1%

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 169

China Renaissance analyst Jack Zhou upgraded Apple to Buy from Hold on November 11 and set a $425 price target, the highest on the Street. DZ Bank went the other way a week earlier. It cut the stock to Sell from Hold on November 4, arguing that rising margin pressure meets a high valuation, with memory chip prices squeezing earnings, supply shortages limiting sales and growth in high-margin Services slowing.

Apple’s own outlook backs up some of that worry. The company guided December-quarter gross margin lower, pointing to memory costs and Siri spending, and expects Services to grow more slowly. Still, the September quarter was strong. The iPhone set a September-quarter record, and revenue rose 12% to $114.5 billion.

Apple sells the iPhone, Mac and iPad, and its moat is an installed base of devices that keeps customers in one ecosystem. Adam Sarhan of 50 Park Investments told Reuters that big companies are cutting AI spending, which makes Apple’s restraint look wiser. Our piece Billionaire Ken Fisher and Jim Cramer Still Like Apple (AAPL). Should You? covers why two prominent investors still like the stock.

9. Eli Lilly (NYSE:LLY)

Market Cap: $1.33 trillion

Average Upside Potential: 6%

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 152

Jefferies raised its price target on Eli Lilly to $1,700 on November 9. The firm argues that the pool of patients outside the United States is about twice the size of the American one, that reaching them will not take deep price cuts, and that adoption abroad will be slower than at home.

Lilly’s third-quarter numbers fit that picture. Revenue rose 39%, and management raised its full-year guidance. Volume grew 53% while realized prices fell 15%, and they fell much faster outside the United States than at home. The new oral obesity pill Foundayo has also started to add sales. In other words, the growth comes from selling far more doses, not from charging more.

Lilly makes the diabetes and weight-loss drugs Mounjaro and Zepbound, and its moat is a deep pipeline and manufacturing scale in GLP-1 medicines that few rivals can match. Most of its revenue comes from that one drug class, so a slip against competitors would hurt. We looked at whether volume can keep outrunning falling prices in Eli Lilly (LLY) Grew Revenue 48% While Prices Fell, Can Volume Keep Winning? Formal guidance for 2027 is due in January.

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