5 Best Long-Term Dividend Stocks To Buy Now

1. Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ:MSFT)

Number of Hedge Fund Investors: 306

Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ:MSFT) has a low dividend yield but years of dividend growth and a huge share price upside potential makes it a dividend stock to buy and hold forever, according to the analyst reports and mainstream financial websites we consulted.

Hedge funds agree. Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ:MSFT) was the most popular stock among the 910 hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey as of the end of the third quarter of 2023.

Polen Focus Growth Strategy stated the following regarding Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) in its fourth quarter 2023 investor letter:

“The largest relative detractors in the quarter were Illumina, Airbnb, and Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT). Microsoft’s business continues to grow well, albeit at slower rates than in the previous few years. That said, it was a relative detractor to the Portfolio because our 7% average weighting for both the quarter and the year were significantly lower than the 12% benchmark weighting in the Russell 1000 Growth. Microsoft shares appreciated a benchmark-beating 19% in 4Q and 58% in 2023.

In addition, we also expect generative AI to help not just Microsoft’s Azure cloud service business grow, but also to be an additional growth driver for the company’s Productivity Suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.) and Power Platform, which helps build internal apps for businesses.

Microsoft has created generative AI co-pilots, which are bots that use large language models (LLMs) to make a customer’s Microsoft software even more functional. As an example, co-pilot offerings from Microsoft can take text and data from Word and Excel and automatically create a PowerPoint presentation from it. We expect to see generative AI demand from Azure customers becoming a larger contributor to growth of that segment while Microsoft Co-pilot becomes a premium feature of the high-end Microsoft commercial bundles, leading to better pricing. Given the strength of the company’s existing businesses and the expected strong product cycle driven by generative AI advancements, we chose to add to our Microsoft position. It is now our second largest position behind Amazon.”

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