7 Stocks to Buy and Hold for the Next 15 Years

Some of Disney's prime assets are folks who never ask for a raise, including Goofy, Cinderella and Luke Skywalker.

By James K. Glassman, From Kiplinger's Personal Finance, October 2014

My advice to investors has always been to buy stocks for the long term. What’s long? When you purchase a stock, you should think of yourself as a partner in the business forever—or until you need the cash. But forever, or even 30 years, is way out on the dim horizon. A more manageable view might be 15 years. If you invest $10,000 today in a stock that returns an average of 12% per year (a return that is two percentage points higher than the historic long-term return of Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index), you’ll end up with about $55,000.

2 Surprising Bargain Stocks for Value Investors

Ouch! I was prepared for some volatility when I invested in a skin-care company that relies on direct selling. But I really didn’t expect to get skinned alive so soon after I bought the stock. For those of us who consider ourselves value investors, however, suffering through what we hope are temporary setbacks is just part of the game.
Perhaps I should back up and explain. In mid July, I bought 148 shares of Nu Skin Enterprises (symbol NUS), which sells skin creams and other anti-aging products. At $67.80, the stock had already been cut in half since the start of the year and was selling at 11 times projected year-ahead earnings. The shares looked cheap. Unfortunately, they got much cheaper, falling to as low as $43.50 after Nu Skin reported disappointing second-quarter results. The stock closed at $48 on August 7.
Nu Skin, based in Provo, Utah, uses multilevel marketing to move its products. Like Herbalife (HLF), which uses a nearly identical business model, Nu Skin has suffered through and survived numerous investigations into its sales practices.