John Ballard, The Motley Fool
4 min read
Buying a stock to hold forever doesn’t mean forgetting about the business. It means holding on as long as the investment case holds up.
Shopify (NASDAQ: SHOP) and Duolingo (NASDAQ: DUOL) just showed that case getting stronger, with strong third-quarter financial results. These leaders in e-commerce and mobile learning are building momentum heading into 2027, making them timely growth stocks to buy in November and hold for potentially a lifetime of compounding returns.
Missed AI’s “Act 1”? Act 2 Could Be 16x Bigger. Most investors think they missed the AI boat because they didn’t buy Nvidia in 2005. But according to our analysts, we’re only at the end of “Act 1″—the R&D phase. “Act 2” is the global rollout. Continue »
Shopify
Shopify provides the software that merchants use to run their entire business, both online and in stores. Once a company’s products, orders, and customers are running on Shopify, switching is costly and disruptive. In 2026, Shopify has proven it can be a major beneficiary of more people using artificial intelligence (AI) to find things to buy.
Its gross merchandise volume (GMV), the total value of sales on its platform, grew 30% year over year last quarter to about $119 billion. That’s the sixth straight quarter at this level of growth.
AI agents are opening up a whole new channel in commerce. President Harley Finkelstein said AI traffic to Shopify merchants rose 2.6 times over the prior year, and orders grew 3.3 times.
That’s why management sees AI as a growth driver. Finkelstein called agentic shopping “an incremental increase to commerce.” Shopify is showing it can adapt to technological shifts to help its merchants grow their businesses, which is why this is a business built to compound over decades.
As of midday trading on Nov. 4, the stock’s price-to-free cash flow multiple is about 85, which looks expensive but within the stock’s historical range. It’s a platform merchants depend on, and it appears to be gaining even more relevance in this new AI era. That’s a growth stock investors can hold for years.
Duolingo
Duolingo is the world’s leading mobile learning platform, with nearly 65 million daily active users. It turns learning into a game by rewarding users with streaks and other incentives to encourage them to open the app every day.
That daily engagement feeds a data advantage. “Nobody has the amount of data of people learning that we do,” CEO Luis von Ahn said. Duolingo runs hundreds of tests every week to improve the app, and he credits most of its user gains to better retention.
