Key Points
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Shopify is helping its merchants thrive, with AI-driven orders surging in 2026.
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Duolingo is seeing accelerating daily user growth as it targets 1 billion users over the long term.
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Shopify’s sticky merchant platform and Duolingo’s daily-habit app give each a long runway to compound.
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Buying a stock to hold forever doesn’t mean forgetting about the business. It means holding on as long as the investment case holds up.
Shopify (NASDAQ: SHOP) and Duolingo (NASDAQ: DUOL) just showed that case getting stronger, with strong third-quarter financial results. These leaders in e-commerce and mobile learning are building momentum heading into 2027, making them timely growth stocks to buy in November and hold for potentially a lifetime of compounding returns.
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Shopify
Shopify provides the software that merchants use to run their entire business, both online and in stores. Once a company’s products, orders, and customers are running on Shopify, switching is costly and disruptive. In 2026, Shopify has proven it can be a major beneficiary of more people using artificial intelligence (AI) to find things to buy.
Its gross merchandise volume (GMV), the total value of sales on its platform, grew 30% year over year last quarter to about $119 billion. That’s the sixth straight quarter at this level of growth.
AI agents are opening up a whole new channel in commerce. President Harley Finkelstein said AI traffic to Shopify merchants rose 2.6 times over the prior year, and orders grew 3.3 times.
That’s why management sees AI as a growth driver. Finkelstein called agentic shopping “an incremental increase to commerce.” Shopify is showing it can adapt to technological shifts to help its merchants grow their businesses, which is why this is a business built to compound over decades.
As of midday trading on Nov. 4, the stock’s price-to-free cash flow multiple is about 85, which looks expensive but within the stock’s historical range. It’s a platform merchants depend on, and it appears to be gaining even more relevance in this new AI era. That’s a growth stock investors can hold for years.
Duolingo
Duolingo is the world’s leading mobile learning platform, with nearly 65 million daily active users. It turns learning into a game by rewarding users with streaks and other incentives to encourage them to open the app every day.
That daily engagement feeds a data advantage. “Nobody has the amount of data of people learning that we do,” CEO Luis von Ahn said. Duolingo runs hundreds of tests every week to improve the app, and he credits most of its user gains to better retention.
The results are showing. Daily active users (DAUs) grew 29% year over year last quarter, up from 23% in Q2 and 21% in Q1. Bookings growth followed, accelerating to 12% from 8%, and management raised its full-year guidance.
The runway is long. “Our ambition is to ultimately reach 1 billion learners and build a much larger business over time,” von Ahn said. About 1 billion people are learning math worldwide, he noted, and chess just hit 10 million daily users while remaining “completely under-monetized.”
The stock traded at about 21 times trailing free cash flow, at the $168 share price on Nov. 4. A learning app that people open every day and that adapts to each person is a compounder worth holding for the long haul.
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John Ballard has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Duolingo and Shopify. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
