Buy and hold for a decade: The stocks this fund manager won't let go of

This interview was filmed Tuesday 2nd June, 2026

In a market structurally obsessed with the macro, rate changes, the daily rotation of sector trends and 24/7 news headlines, true bottom-up investing can feel like a lost art.

For Hollie Briggs and the Growth Equity Strategies team at Loomis Sayles, ignoring the noise isn't just an investing proverb, it’s a foundational discipline built over twenty years.

Three points stood out to me before I spoke to Briggs. Firstly, when they say they hold stocks for the long term, this isn’t just lip-service. Their time horizon in their growth strategy is on average ten years or longer. Secondly, they own six of the Mag 7 stocks. And lastly, they track every position they have ever exited to see if their original thesis has played out.

Here’s a key example of their process at work. The firm has owned Amazon for nearly two decades. In that time, the stock has fallen 20% or more on 14 separate occasions - once, it fell 60%. They held through all of it.

"If you held Amazon stock the entire time through those drawdowns, you outperformed the Russell 1000 Growth tenfold,” says Briggs.

For Briggs, this result is an example of the output of a process the team at Loomis Sayles have run, unchanged, for two decades - find exceptional businesses, wait for the price to come to you, and hold on long enough for the thesis to play out.

Watch the full interview above for all of the insights, or read a summary below.

“Volatility is a feature, not a bug”

With a news cycle geared toward clickbait headlines and fear-mongering, investor sentiment often overrides business fundamentals. The primary challenge for many is enduring the emotional rollercoaster of market corrections.

According to Briggs, the secret to remaining unfazed is in reframing how you view market swings. 

"Looking at the markets and really understanding that volatility is a feature of the market. It's not a bug that we can fix. So we want to embrace that as part of our investment philosophy and process."

To exploit this volatility rather than fall victim to it, the team eschews the traditional quantitative screens used by many asset managers. While screens can filter out companies based on historical debt or return profiles, they fail to capture forward-looking shifts.

"The problem with using screens like that is that they're backward looking and what we're trying to recognise are inflection points."

"A screen isn't going to tell you if something that was doing poorly is about to do better or something that was doing well is about to do more poorly."

Agricultural company Deere & Co (NYSE: DE) is an example. On the surface it looks like a cyclical farm equipment business. The down cycle - when good harvests push commodity prices low and farmers stop buying tractors - is the entry point. But looking out, the picture shifts.

“We can see that by 2060 population on earth is going to increase by a third, but the demand for grain is going to double and there's no more arable land,” says Briggs, in a blunt assessment of our future. "The structural driver is meeting that demand with ever more efficient agricultural tools." 

Deconstructing the Magnificent Seven narrative

One of the greatest distractions in the current market environment is the temptation to group distinct businesses under a single narrative.

The portfolio currently holds six of the so-called Magnificent Seven, owned for an average of more than 13 years. Briggs is sceptical of the label - "they have nothing more in common than recent high profile performance" - and even more sceptical of the idea that they're all the same AI trade.

For example, three quarters of Alphabet’s (NYSE: GOOG) revenue comes from online advertising, not AI. The AI tools being built into its products - better ad targeting, smarter search, YouTube creation tools - are making that existing advertising business more valuable. Cloud is a separate growth engine, up roughly 60% year-on-year. Total revenue growth across the business is still running at 20–30%.

Then there's Oracle (NYSE: ORCL), a name drawing investor concern right now over the cost of building AI infrastructure. Loomis Sayles isn't worried - for Briggs, the capex build out is a necessary part of the company's cycle. The legacy database business is profitable and sticky, with client retention above 95%, and generating the cash to fund the build.

"They are a database company. They process data. They really are a key company to be engaged in that type of investment cycle."

Why Apple doesn’t make the cut

Despite owning six of the Mag-7, the fund completely avoids Apple (NYSE: AAPL). The decision comes down to understanding the moat within the technology value chain.

While Apple has a powerful consumer ecosystem, the hardware layer itself is historically vulnerable to disruption. Briggs points to the period when Samsung entered the smartphone space and rapidly captured 50% market share.

To mitigate this risk, the team prefers to invest further up the value chain, holding a position in chipmaker Qualcomm (NYSE: QCOM) instead. As Briggs explains:

"It doesn't matter who happens to be winning the current popularity contest in handsets, they're all going to have Qualcomm chips."

The reality of the long-term horizon

Much is made of long-term investing for an eight to 10-year holding period. Far fewer investors have the stomach to see it through.

To illustrate the discipline required, Briggs shared a study of their 20-year holding of Amazon (NYSE: AMZN). Over that period, the stock went through 14 separate drawdowns of 20% or more, ranging from 35% to a brutal 60% decline.

Yet, investors who stayed the course outperformed the Russell 1000 Growth index tenfold. The lesson may be clichéd, but it’s clear: outperformance requires "time in the market, and staying the course."

This long-term perspective also informs how the team acts during broader market dislocations.

The newest addition to the portfolio is Ferrari (NYSE: RACE), bought during a stretch of weakness caused by production issues and pressure on the luxury sector broadly.

The name is synonymous with not only luxury, but desire. That isn't accidental - Ferrari cultivates scarcity, it manufactures fewer cars than the market wants, and access to the latest models is restricted to existing owners.

The result is a ~35% revenue share in the supercar market and pricing power that doesn't erode. Short-term controversies don’t change that, says Briggs.

A rigorous post-mortem on exits

The team scales into positions gradually, often taking a full year to build a 1% exposure, and scales out just as methodically as a stock approaches its estimated intrinsic value.

They categorise sales into three distinct buckets: reaching intrinsic value, finding a better reward-to-risk alternative, or, "an incorrect investment thesis. That's what compliance makes us say. A mistake," explains Briggs.

Crucially, they track every single position they exit to measure whether the sold stock underperformed the remaining portfolio. If a sold company goes on to outperform, it is flagged as an error in judgment.

By maintaining this accountability, the team boasts a "batting average" of 92% in their global growth strategy. 

Right now

The team has been adding during the recent volatility, including to Microsoft (NYSE: MSFT) for the first time in years. The broader software selloff, in Briggs' view, has been indiscriminate. 

"It's not a broad brush stroke that every software company is facing an existential crisis because of AI."

With the broader portfolio currently trading at roughly a 45% discount to estimated intrinsic value, the ultimate takeaway is to view market corrections as opportunities - and practice patience above all else.