In 1937, audiences met a princess and seven dwarfs in a fictional fairy tale kingdom in what became one of the most famous films of all time, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Each dwarf had a different temperament and served a different purpose, but together they made something none of them could alone. Almost a century later, seven companies became the “Magnificent Seven” and drove much of the markets returns for the better part of a decade.
Turns out good things come in sevens.
Seven of us write about finance on Substack, and a month ago we introduced ourselves with a simple question: how did we start, what shaped us, and how do we invest today? You met all seven of us.
The response floored us with over 100 reposts and a comment section that turned into its own conversation about our common philosophy we quietly shared. As one reader put it, the strategies were wildly different, yet the fundamentals kept converging: do the research, size your risk, keep costs down, and give compounding enough time to work.
A brief introduction to the seven writers: One lives in Hong Kong off the capital he invests, with no salary behind it. One picks high-conviction names for investors who think differently. One hunts spin-offs and compounds at 23% a year. One teaches macro to beginners and has beaten the S&P three years running. One quit his job on the back of a single ETF strategy. One maps the private giants reshaping public markets. One spent two decades trading across New York, London, and Asia before deciding the most useful thing he could do was explain it all in plain English.
Like the seven dwarfs, we each have a slightly different investing philosophy which isn’t surprising seeing as we live on different continents, earn our money in different ways and are at different stages in our investment journey. What unites us all is the joy of learning and the value of the opinions of others, yours included. At the end of our first piece we included a survey with topics for future posts. Your answers formed the basis of the topic we will cover today and a poll is included at the end of the post so you can decide on future posts.
Last round we told you where we started, this round we show you what we will not let go of.
Without further ado, let’s jump straight into round two:
What is one asset or stock that you would never sell and what is your main thesis behind this position? If you have one yourself, feel free to share it in the comment section.
It’s hard to pick a stock to “never sell.” After all, time is the ultimate winner. If you hold a stock for long enough, management will change, fundamentals will evolve and a moat that once looked impregnable will eventually fall.
In the words of Marcus Aurelius: “Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future, too.”
With AI becoming more prevalent, companies that were once seen as nearly untouchable have come under siege. And this trend will continue as AI improves.
The way I view it, this leaves me gravitating towards two types of stocks when choosing my investments.
A: A company that is in an industry that AI doesn’t threaten.
B: A company that is leading the AI race.
Some of my investments, like Mastercard, capture the first part. Businesses that I don’t see AI disrupting. Others, like Meta, fall into the second category.
With Amazon, I feel I capture both simultaneously, which is why I am so bullish on the company.
Let’s start with the core business.
Amazon generated more than $400 billion from first-party retail sales and services provided to third-party sellers. It’s easy to understand why. Once a user experiences next-day shipping, it’s hard to settle for anything else. Additionally, Amazon generates massive amounts of revenue from advertising. Their advertising business, which only began with $20 billion in 2020, has grown to $68 billion in 2025. An astounding 28% CAGR since inception.
Those aren’t the only parts of the company that are growing rapidly. Amazon Web Services, Amazon’s cloud-computing platform and crown jewel, has more than doubled its revenue in the past five years.
And Amazon’s upside doesn’t end simply with its core businesses. Chip production, robotics, autonomous vehicles, strategic investments, Amazon seems to be expanding, innovating and succeeding across an extraordinary number of verticals.
That’s why I am so confident holding Amazon. Rather than sit back and treat their business as a mature company distributing excess cash to shareholders, Amazon continues to treat their company as a trillion-dollar startup. Amazon firmly believes the best way to reward shareholders is by reinvesting in the company, not through returning cash to the shareholder.
If AI booms, Amazon will boom with it. If AI disappoints, Amazon will still have a multi-trillion dollar business to fall back on.
In 2026, when Amazon dipped to $200 I posted that Amazon is a screaming buy. Today, I feel as confident as ever investing in Amazon and holding long term. My full thesis on Amazon is linked here:
Palantir🔮
Before I share which stock I’ll never sell, I must confess that I am a huge Tolkien and Lord of the Rings nerd. So, the moment I heard about a company named Palantir, after the legendary seeing stones, I knew their founders had tapped into something uniquely powerful, much like the palantíri in Tolkien’s lore.
These seeing stones were forged for instant, secure long-distance communication and surveillance across vast realms. In the real world, Palantir Technologies was born in the wake of 9/11, when the U.S. government and its Intelligence agencies were drowning in an ocean of data with no way to make sense of it.
This is ultimately what gave rise to Palantir’s ontology. The technology serves as a central digital twin and operational layer of an enterprise, mapping raw, siloed data sources into interconnected objects, properties, links, and actions that humans and AI agents can use to operate their business, or a mission in national defense.
In 2008, Palantir launched its foundational software platform, Palantir Gotham, for intelligence and defense agencies. It is rumored, though never officially confirmed, that Gotham was used to help track, locate, and ultimately kill Osama bin Laden in May 2011.
Four years later their flagship commercial platform, Palantir Foundry, was launched. This allowed them to expand deep into the private sector.
This is where you’ll begin to understand why I will never sell this stock.
Palantir has barely scratched the surface of the commercial market. Only 653 of 22,000 US-based companies with a minimum of $100M/year in revenue have partnered with Palantir. That’s only 3% of the US market that has been penetrated so far! Not to mention, Palantir’s Q2 2026 NRR is 157%. That means that if their average customer spent $1M with them last year, they’re now spending $1.57M this year. They are growing existing customers at an astounding rate while having only tapped a small percentage of their addressable market.
They have consistently scored over 100% and rising on the “Rule of 40” score over the past four quarters. This metric has me convinced that Palantir is a once in a generation company.
Q3 2025: 114%
Q4 2025: 127%
Q1 2026: 145%
Q2 2026: 155%
While Michael Burry may be shorting Palantir with contracts expiring in early 2027, I plan on holding my shares well into the 2030s and beyond. I believe that by then Palantir will be one of the top 10 most valuable companies in the world. For those interested in learning more about the one company that I’ll never sell, I wrote extensively on Palantir in a Deep dive linked here.
I almost picked a stock.
My instinct was to name a great company and be done with it (as an aside, I agree with many of the picks made by my fellow Seven Figures). But the more I thought about it, one problem kept surfacing. Companies are run by people and management changes. Sometimes that is a gift, sometimes it is a wrecking ball, and you rarely know which until it is too late. This year alone will test that thesis as Buffett and Cook passed the baton to new leaders. Bottom line, even the best business carries key man risk.
So I went looking for an asset with no key man risk at all. No CEO to disappoint me and no founder to lose the plot. That search naturally led me to Bitcoin, a position I have held since 2017.
Start with the backdrop. Deficits are spiraling out of control in most major economies and there is no serious plan to rein them in. When you cannot tax your way out or grow your way out, you print your way out. More printing means more dollars (or euros or yen or…) chasing the same goods and services, which leads to inflation and a currency that quietly loses value every year. In that world, real assets are the natural place to park your money.
Gold was the obvious candidate. It has played this role for five thousand years, and I respect it. But I went with Bitcoin, and the reason comes down to scarcity you can actually count on. There will only ever be 21 million Bitcoin mined and we just crossed 20 million. No committee can vote to print more, no discovery of a new mine changes the supply. It’s a cliché, but clichés are often true: Bitcoin is the hardest cap money has ever had.
Of course it’s hard to value something without an identifiable cash flow but I love to look at relative value. Line up the total value of all the gold in the world and at today’s prices you get about $31 trillion. Those 20 million Bitcoin are worth just over $1.5 trillion. On a relative basis, either gold is far too expensive or Bitcoin is far too cheap. You can see which way I am betting (for the record, I also own some gold).
I am not blind to the risks and two keep me honest. The first is quantum computing eventually threatening the cryptography underneath. The second is a younger generation that never adopts it. Both are real, both are also years away, so they give the network plenty of time to adapt plus I am confident Bitcoin clears both hurdles.
So that is my never-sell. Not a company that depends on the right person staying in the right chair. An asset that answers to no one, cannot be printed, and gets scarcer by design… Bitcoin.
This is a tough one. If you’ve seen any of my posts, you may know that my approach to investing is entirely rules-based. I rely on evidence in data and historical probabilities, not on opinions or discretionary analysis.
I do everything I can to keep human bias, opinions, and emotions out of investing, because I know it tends to be our biggest disadvantage in the markets. Falling in love with a position is a classic textbook trap. I’ve tried it multiple times myself earlier in my career, holding on to losing positions far too long.
Around seven years ago, I finally gave in to all the research that shows how much randomness goes into stock-picking, and how incredibly few people consistently outperform the market with this approach.
I finally decided to skip stock-picking and go all in on what has worked consistently over decades and across multiple business cycles. This means the strategy I run today is based on quantitative factors and persistent market anomalies.
It may sound complex, but the system I started following in early 2021 is actually quite simple. It just outputs two ETFs once a month, and I allocate my money 50/50 into these two ETFs. No matter what.
This approach does not care about any companies, Fed signals, or business cycles. All it does is follow what has historically worked. This strategy was the reason I was able to quit my day job in the spring of 2026. You can learn about it on my profile.
All of this being said, I’m also a human being (yes, with feelings and all!), and contrary to my main strategy, I own a few small positions in individual stocks. If I had to pick one that would be hard for me to sell, it would be Novo Nordisk.
Novo Nordisk is by far the largest public company in Denmark where I live. It’s an important driver of the Danish economy, and one in every eight Danes owns stock in this business. I have friends and relatives working for them. I have people close to me depending on their medicine. That’s why I can’t imagine not owning a small position in this company.
For full transparency, this is based more on emotions than conviction, and I don’t recommend doing this, except with small amounts of money. It’s part of a small portfolio I mostly run for fun. My serious money is allocated to the rules-based ETF strategy I’m sharing with my subscribers.
One asset I would never sell is definitely Gold.
I bought my first physical Gold in 2022. I researched the commodity space for 5 years or so, when I became more serious about investing. It was quite clear for me when I started researching that Gold is important. Very important.
If I would have been a teacher in high school about economics I would definitely start one of my first lessons about Gold. I studied business & economics and followed many economics lessons in high school, but couldn’t remember any lesson about Gold.
Why is Gold so important?
If you ask me, Gold is the anchor of our financial system and if you think further the anchor of our society. That may sound a little bit weird. But I will tell you why I think so.
Gold is trust, Gold is a hedge against inflation and it is nobody’s liability. The characteristics of Gold are very interesting.
When Gold was decoupled from the dollar, the purchasing power of the dollar declined in a very fast way. The purchasing power of the dollar declined to less than $20 compared to 1971. But it is not a headline nowadays.
Prices go up year after year, so many people think they are rich today when they own assets. But it is way better to look at your purchasing power development over the years.
Gold is a real hedge against inflation, and has a track record of many years.
If you ask me, everyone has to hold Gold in his long term portfolio.
I wrote an article about Gold recently. You can read it here:
The closest I come to a “never sell” stock is DBS Group, Southeast Asia’s largest bank. I bought it in 2024 at a dividend yield above 6 per cent. That income now helps pay my living costs, so this is not a theoretical attachment to a good company. The cash turns up and does a job.
I bought DBS because I thought it was one of the best-run banks in the world. The attraction was the combination: consistently high returns on equity, a low cost-to-income ratio, conservative credit management, disciplined capital returns and management that treated technology as part of the bank rather than a department inside it.
The record since then has strengthened the case. DBS produced a 16.2 per cent return on equity in 2025, with record total income of S$22.9 billion and record pre-tax profit of S$13.1 billion despite falling interest rates. That last part matters to me. Many banks look clever when wider net interest margins are doing the work for them. I want to know what happens when that easy tailwind fades. DBS still grew total income as margins narrowed, helped by record fee income and treasury customer sales. Wealth-management income reached S$5.7 billion, up 9 per cent, with record net new money. I read the changing mix as evidence that the bank is becoming less dependent on the interest-rate cycle.
Then there is Singapore itself. I see DBS as the strongest listed expression of the country’s role as one of Asia’s two major wealth hubs, alongside Hong Kong. MAS has spent years building a favourable but credible environment for banks, fund managers, family offices and fintech companies, while investing in financial talent and technology. Singapore’s assets under management reached S$6.7 trillion in 2025. More than three-quarters came from outside the country, and net inflows rose 29 per cent.
DBS sits in the middle of those flows. It has Singapore’s largest domestic banking franchise, a growing regional network, a strong wealth business and a 28.3 per cent strategic shareholder in Temasek. The leadership transition from Piyush Gupta to Tan Su Shan did not feel like a reset either. Tan had already run both wealth management and institutional banking, the two businesses most relevant to the next leg of the thesis.
I do not believe in holding any stock regardless of price or evidence. If DBS became extremely expensive, I would trim it, but I would be reluctant to sell the core position. For me, replacing a proven bank and a yield above 6 per cent on my cost may create more risk than the sale removes.
The thesis breaks if Singapore loses its strategic position as an Asian wealth hub, or if DBS stops converting that advantage into disciplined execution. Until then, the dividend keeps paying part of my living costs.
Never selling a position means holding it forever. And forever is a very long time. Yet, there is one business I have never sold a single share of, and I don’t intend to: Amazon.
Why Amazon? The consensus explanations are well-documented, and I agree with most of them. But for me, the thesis is twofold.
The most important driver is an intangible that escapes traditional valuation metrics: Culture. Amazon is an empire, yet it retains the relentless willingness to compete, optimize, and operate like the world’s largest startup.
Amazon is ruthless when eliminating competition. They enter a new market and happily operate on absurdly low margins. This strategy only works because they heavily cross-subsidize these new ventures using their established profit engines. Amazon can hold its breath much longer than anyone else, who is less diversified and less profitable. Once the competition inevitably suffocates and Amazon becomes the dominant player, they raise margins back up. A new profit engine is born. Now it’s rinse and repeat: cross-subsidize, eliminate competition, compound capital.
The second reason I intend to hold Amazon forever is really simple. I believe Amazon will still be here in 30 or 40 years, and I’ll just let them compound.
Currently they are perfectly positioned to capitalize on the physical application of artificial intelligence and edge computing. I wrote about it twice.
The short version: Amazon is turning its fulfillment centers into massive profit engines through applying Physical AI, unlocking profitability gains on their largest revenue base, which is currently operating on low margins. Read more about Amazon‘s robotics strategy here.
The longer and more technical version is this: If you want a deep dive into how physical AI and inference compute reshape industrial economics, read my full thesis here:
Outro:
There it is, seven writers and seven different perspectives.
Notice how all of our answers differ, both in our choices themselves and the level of conviction. A few of us confidently said that we would never sell. Others said that they wanted to hold forever, but in certain situations they would decide to trim or sell.
There is not one “correct” answer to our original question. Every person reading this has a different background, lives in a different country and is in a different financial situation. A “never sell” asset will look different for everyone. What is important is finding those assets, ones that you are comfortable letting compound without having to constantly look at your portfolio.
Additionally, the question “what asset will you never sell” should be preceded by another question. “What is my financial situation?” For someone retired, their “never sell” asset could be ten year treasury notes at 5%. For an eighteen-year-old it could be a young AI company that he sees massive potential in for decades to come. Both can be the correct answers given their circumstances. What’s important is first figuring out what situation you are in.
What all seven of us agreed on is that investing your money into assets that you believe will grow over time is critical. Letting go of your hard earned cash is hard to do but the silent killer is inflation. Cash tends to feel safe, but eventually anyone not investing their money into assets will see their purchasing power decrease over time. On the other hand, owning scarce or productive assets will allow you to preserve and even grow your wealth over time. We listed our picks, and would love to hear yours in the comments below.
Disclaimer: Seven Figures: A Roundtable is seven independent Substack writers comparing notes, not guaranteeing any future investment success. Everything here is for education and entertainment only. Each of us speaks for ourselves, and nobody speaks for your portfolio but you. We have all been gloriously wrong before, and we will be again so feel free to steal the reasoning but not the necessarily the trades. Do your own research and talk to a professional before betting the rent money.