5 Best Technology Stocks to Buy for Long Term

2. Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT)

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 259

Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) is the world’s second most valuable company in the world by market cap. Unlike many on the list of 10 best technology stocks to buy for the long term, Microsoft pays out dividends to its shareholders. Its latest dividend payout of $0.62 per share is due on June 9 in line with its dividend payment history.

On May 23, Jefferies analyst Brent Thill lowered the price target on Microsoft to $325 down from $400 and kept a ‘Buy’ rating on the shares. Microsoft beat analyst expectations in its quarterly filings of Q1, 2022. With a revenue of $49.3 and EPS of $2.22, it beat consensus estimates on EPS and revenue by $0.02 and $311.18 million respectively. Its consensus EPS forecast for July 2024 stands at $12.09 based on the estimates of 7 analysts. 

Microsoft Corporation produces both software and hardware products. Its most popular products on the software side include windows operating systems, Office Suite, Bing, Skype, Visual Studio and Azure among others. On the hardware side, its most popular product includes the Xbox gaming console. 

Fisher Asset Management was the most bullish on MSFT stock among the 259 bullish hedge funds in the first quarter of 2022. The fund managed by Ken Fisher had Microsoft shares worth $8.6 billion. 

This is what Baron Opportunity Fund had to say about Microsoft in their Q4, 2021 investor letter: 

“Shares of Microsoft Corporation, a cloud-software leader and provider of software productivity tools and infrastructure, rose during the quarter, following a strong earnings report highlighting solid demand for its broad product stack and continued momentum migrating its business to the cloud. Microsoft’s results continued to be strong across the board, with total revenue growing 20% in constant currency, beating Street estimates by 3%; an acceleration in Commercial Cloud revenue to 34% constant-currency growth; operating margins expanding to just under 45%; earnings growth of 23%; and free cash flow growth of 30%. We believe the company is positioned to deliver 13% to 15% organic growth over the next three years, underpinned by total addressable market expansion and continued market share gains across its disruptive cloud product portfolio.”