Over the long run, the stock market has proved to be a superior wealth creator. Over the last century, no other asset class has come anywhere close to matching the annualized average return generated by stocks. But not all stocks are created equally.
One of Wall Street's greatest attributes is that it's dynamic. History tells us that today's largest stocks are unlikely to be the biggest publicly traded companies 20 years from now. Ongoing innovation, mergers, acquisitions, legal judgments, competition, and a host of other factors are constantly shaking up the "leaderboard" on Wall Street.
Despite this unpredictability, I strongly believe one of the largest companies on today's leaderboard can overcome historic odds and become the first stock to reach a $5 trillion market cap. It won't be these three widely touted "Magnificent Seven" stocks For a company to reach a $5 trillion valuation, it would have to be an industry leader that's fueled by innovation and generates boatloads of cash flow. In other words, the perfect definition of companies found in the " Magnificent Seven .
" However, some of the most-logical candidates among the Magnificent Seven are the stocks I believe are least likely to reach the psychological $5 trillion level. For example, the infrastructure backbone of the artificial intelligence (AI) movement, Nvidia ( NVDA 5.16% ) , probably looks like a no-brainer to become the world's largest company by market cap.
Nvidia's graphics processing units (GPUs) have be.