Very, very few companies qualify as "buy now and hold forever" stocks.

There are many more stocks you can buy now and hang onto for the long term - at least a year - with confidence, not to mention a shot at hefty profits.

From that long list of stocks, my team and I narrowed the list down by focusing on powerful trends, markets with strong, predictable rates of growth, and businesses benefitting from rapid high-tech tailwinds - and using these as guides to zero in on sector leaders.

Image source: Pixabay

Stock No. 1: The Best Thing to Happen to Money in 5,000 Years

Square Inc. (NYSE: SQ) is a fintech leader, and fintech is one of the hottest sectors around today. Square has a leg up on most of the competition in the payments slice of the fintech market.

Payments is where the big advances - and big bucks - figure to be.

Square is a favorite of mine because it's all about technological transformation. It's about peer-to-peer payments. The company's mobile-payments platform is about helping individuals start and grow their businesses. Its Cash App service is going to be a one-stop-shop for everything related to finance and e-commerce.

There's an addressable market that's huge - huge and growing, I'd add - with no ceiling in sight, just open blue skies.

Square's now about content, too. Its Tidal division is about artists creating, about ticketing, about merchandising, and, no surprise here, about making money. Square's numbers are getting better all the time because the company is expanding its platforms and ecosystem. As we saw with Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL) - a buy-and-hold-forever stock if ever there was one - that's a winning recipe for continually higher share prices.

Revenue grew 328.95% from 2017 to 2020, and it's already up another 38.9% over the past 12 months, while the stock itself is up a market-crushing 61% in that time.

Stock No. 2: The Comeback Play That Keeps Going

I'll tell you flat out: I've liked Expedia Group Inc. (Nasdaq: EXPE) for a long, long time despite the ups and downs of the pandemic.

It's a meat-and-potatoes leisure stock with a juicy side of e-commerce.

One of the truly alluring features of Expedia is a brand portfolio that includes Brand Expedia, a full-service online travel brand with localized websites; Hotels.com for marketing and distributing lodging accommodations; Vrbo, an online marketplace for the alternative accommodations; Orbitz, Travelocity, and CheapTickets travel websites; Hotwire, which offers travel booking services; CarRentals.com, an online car rental booking service; Classic Vacations, a luxury travel specialist; and Expedia Cruise, a provider of advice for travelers booking cruises.

The company's brand portfolio also comprises Expedia Partner Solutions, a business-to-business (B2B) brand that provides corporate-travel management, airlines, travel agents, online retailers, and financial institutions; and Egencia, which provides corporate-travel-management services. In addition, its brand portfolio consists of Trivago, a hotel metasearch website that sends referrals to online travel companies and travel-service providers from hotel metasearch websites, and Expedia Group Media Solutions. Further, the company provides online travel services through its Wotif.com, lastminute.com.au, travel.com.au, Wotif.co.nz, and last minute.co.nz brands, loyalty programs, hotel accommodations, and alternative accommodations, and advertising and media services.

The performance of the stock since the pandemic has been nothing short of extraordinary - especially in the face of losses as the country and the world shut down. The stock took a dive like everything else; it closed at $48.80 on March 20, 2020. But just 364 days later, March 19, 2021, it closed at an all-time high of $179.98 - a 268% move.