Most investors who buy stocks with plans to own them "forever" do so with the assumption that their underlying companies will thrive just as long. As the slow demise of outfits like General Electric, Kodak, and retailer JCPenney reminds us though, that's not always the case. Every industry eventually changes, but not all companies are able to adapt to that change.
One of my personal holdings, however, is a name that I'm not worried about ever becoming un-ownable due to obsolescence. That's Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG) (NASDAQ: GOOGL).
This isn't to suggest that Alphabet's chief profit centers like search engine Google and video platform YouTube won't eventually face serious competition, not to mention sheer saturation. But for the better part of its existence (since its launch as nothing more than a search engine back in 1998), this company's been willing to enter other lines of business it knew it could do something constructive with.
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