Picking 10 Companies to Hold for 10 Years - Part 4: Popular Picks

For the last post in this series, I thought it would be interesting to see which companies were the most popular for people to pick in order to hold for 10 years. With 128 replies to Dividend Growth Investor's tweet, and most of the replies listing U.S. companies, I was also curious to see how my U.S. picks would compare to the most popular choices.  

The process I undertook to determine the most popular picks was very low-tech. I simply copy and pasted the complete twitter thread into a word processor. Using the thread, I searched the name and stock symbols for the companies that seemed popular and recorded those mentions. I didn't record any company with less than five mentions. Then the mentions were ranked by popularity. The resulting top 10 most popular picks are below:

Microsoft – 41

Johnson & Johnson – 31

Google – 30

Amazon – 29

Visa – 26

Pepsi – 17

Berkshire – 14

Disney – 11

Apple – 11

Facebook – 10

 

Some interesting facts about the top ten choices:

• Four companies do not pay a dividend (Google, Amazon, Berkshire and Facebook).
• Of the above companies, the highest dividend yield  is 3.0% from Pepsi. 
• Of the above companies, the longest streak of consecutive dividend raises belongs to Johnson & Johnson at 58 years. 
• Eight of the top ten picks are part of the top 10 biggest businesses by market capitalization in the U.S. (only Disney and Pepsi are not)

For those of you interested in the next ten most popular choices, here they are:

 

Starbucks – 9

P&G – 9

McDonald’s – 8

Coca-Cola – 7

Costco – 7

Tesla – 7

Mastercard – 6

Abbvie – 6

Home Depot – 6

Realty Income – 5

 

I was pleasantly surprised that my five picks of US stocks (Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson, Amazon, McDonald's and Realty Income) were all accounted for in the top 20. It's also interesting to note that nine of the ten companies above pay dividends, which is more in-line with what I would expect given Dividend Growth Investor asked the thought provoking question. 

Which of the above 20 companies do you think will generate the highest returns over the next 10 years???