What's a good stock investment for long term?

Buy a good S&P index fund. Vanguard has a good one with lows fees. Should get you 8-10% a year over the long run.

apparently anything oil related or health care is going to do well in the long term. the odds of the worlds oil situation getting better in the near term is slight. our aging baby boomer society is in need of more and more heatlh care and a good Health Care fund would be a good choice. neither of those sectors will decline as much as the general market in a pull back.

Although the Vanguard Health Care fund is currently closed to new investors, it is a great choice when and if they open it again. $25K minimum however.

i don't recommend individual stocks unless you are sophisticated enough to be well diversified.

No stock is good for the long term. They can't be trusted. You might think you got one then you wake up to find out the executives have been been defauding the shareholders and you wind up the loser. Go with ETFs, exchange traded funds. They are like mutual funds but are traded like stocks. Go online and google "ETFs" and read all about them. Good sectors right now are energy, and international especially the pacific basin. There is a ton of info on the web and it is worth the time to do your homework. Bottom line....ETFs in instead of individual stocks or conventional mutual funds

If the reports I've got from Colgate-Palmolive (CL) are correct then this would be good long-term investment. Their shares are not very expensive (about 20-30 USD). They have all condition to preform well on stocks market - they have great reputation in Europe, good cash flows, etc. Check their site for more information.

because the oil is going to run out in the next 10 years or so, i think investing in alternative energy companies may benefit you with a nice profit

Go with "TK", about 10 % of world oil transport are shipped with them...

You have some good choices among your answers. And I totally agree that no company is a real good investment over the long term if you consider the long term 10+ years. Technology stocks are perhaps the worse. Changes in technology might leave them in the dust. Novell, DEC, Lotus all come to mind. They were all leaders in technology at one time.

Also over the long term companies tend to atrophy or become so large that they can not grow more than the growth in the economy.

I do not particularly like the S&P 500 index funds, even if in the past they have performed well. The problem is that the S&P 500 is capitalization weighted. So you are actually investing most of your money in maybe the 15 largest companies in the US. That is one problem. Another is that the US may not be the best long term investment. May not even be a good long term investment.

One responder replied that health care and energy might be good long term investments. If you believe that oil is in fact becoming less plentiful, oil companies will be a good investment for several years to come. On the other hand oil companies have had their ups and down in the past. This might just be an up but I don't think so.

I do not agree with one of the responses that alternate energy sources might be good. Too much uncertainty as to where this point might lead and there are no market leaders at this point unless one considers GE on speculation that more nuclear power plants will be built. But don't hold your breath. Maybe a company like Duke Power?

Though I think that there is a place for mutual funds buy remember that 75% underperform the market in general.

Personally, I like to do the research and pick the stocks to buy myself. If I screw up, I only have myself to blame.