The Best Stocks for Long-Term Investing: Two Fintech Leaders Reshaping Finance

When building a portfolio for long-term wealth accumulation, finding companies with expanding revenue streams and strengthening profit margins is essential. Two fintech powerhouses—Robinhood Markets and Nu Holdings—demonstrate precisely these characteristics. Both have built durable competitive advantages in their respective markets, and both continue to deliver the kind of sustainable growth that long-term investors seek.

A $1,000 investment today can become the foundation of substantial wealth over time. While some growth stocks double within a few years, others achieve remarkable gains in even shorter timeframes. The key is identifying companies with strong fundamentals and clear paths to profitability. These two fintech firms qualify on both counts, making them candidates worth considering for your long-term portfolio.

Robinhood Markets: Trading Volume and New Revenue Streams Power Growth

Robinhood (NASDAQ: HOOD) has transformed from a disruptive startup into a mature platform with more than 27 million funded customers. Yet the company continues to expand its reach—customer growth reached 7% year-over-year in 2025, while average revenue per user climbed 16% in the same period. This combination of adding new users while extracting greater value from existing ones represents a powerful long-term growth engine.

The core trading business remains robust. Robinhood’s total revenue jumped 27% year-over-year, with stocks and options trading particularly strong. The company’s cryptocurrency segment has proven more volatile, declining 38% year-over-year as Bitcoin experienced weakness. However, this business segment offers substantial upside potential—it more than quadrupled in the third quarter alone, demonstrating how quickly it can reaccelerate when market conditions shift.

Beyond traditional trading, Robinhood has ventured into prediction markets, a segment that generated 8.5 billion event contract trades in Q4 and maintained momentum with 3.4 billion contracts in January. This emerging business line represents a significant long-term catalyst for growth beyond its core brokerage operations.

The company’s profitability metrics have also improved. Excluding one-time tax and regulatory benefits from late 2024, net income expanded year-over-year, indicating the business is becoming more efficient at converting revenue into earnings. For long-term investors, this progression from growth-at-any-cost to profitable growth is particularly attractive. While the stock has pulled back more than 30% year-to-date, investors willing to maintain a long-term position have been rewarded when the market regains confidence in growth stocks.

Nu Holdings: A Regional Powerhouse with Consistent Expansion

Nu Holdings (NYSE: NU) operates as Latin America’s largest entirely digital bank, serving more than 60% of adults in its home market of Brazil while expanding into Mexico and Colombia. The company’s asset-light model—no physical branches means lower costs and higher margins—creates a sustainable competitive advantage in an increasingly digital financial landscape.

The growth metrics speak for themselves. Nu Holdings delivered 39% year-over-year revenue growth in Q3 2025 while adding 4 million new customers to reach a total customer base exceeding 127 million. The bank maintains an 83% activity rate, meaning the vast majority of customers actively use the platform for investing, saving, and borrowing. This engagement level has remained remarkably consistent, suggesting sticky customer relationships.

Multiple product lines are experiencing explosive growth. Credit card and lending balances expanded 45% year-over-year, while interest-earning portfolios surged 58%. Crucially, this growth came alongside expanding profitability—net income jumped 41% compared to 2024, translating to a 41% net profit margin. For long-term investors, watching a company grow while simultaneously improving margins is a green flag that execution quality and pricing power are both strengthening.

Latin America’s young, increasingly digital population presents a multi-year runway for further expansion. As more consumers adopt digital banking and Nu Holdings penetrates adjacent markets, the company appears well-positioned to remain the region’s banking leader.

What Separates the Best Stocks for Long-Term Holding

Both Robinhood and Nu Holdings offer compelling reasons for long-term investors to examine their portfolios. Robinhood represents exposure to evolving retail investment trends and emerging markets like prediction contracts. Its ability to grow its user base while increasing per-user value creates a powerful compounding dynamic for patient capital.

Nu Holdings, meanwhile, provides long-term exposure to emerging market financial inclusion and digital banking adoption. Its dominance in Latin America, combined with expansion potential across the region and proven ability to maintain engagement, makes it a best stock for investors seeking emerging-market growth with a clear competitive moat.

The best stocks for long-term portfolios share a common characteristic: they combine growing top-line revenue with expanding margins. Robinhood and Nu Holdings both demonstrate this pattern. Whether you’re focused on retail investment trends or emerging market financial services, these two fintech leaders deserve consideration in a long-term investment strategy.