Yahoo names Energy Transfer and Amazon 20-year picks

1/ Yahoo Finance’s May 24 piece is a personal-conviction stock call, not a company announcement: the author said two names they would “hold and forget” for the next 20 years are Energy Transfer and Amazon. (finance.yahoo.com) 2/ The pairing is easy to read. Energy Transfer is the income leg: a large U.S. midstream operator structured around pipelines, storage and fee-based energy infrastructure. Amazon is the growth leg: e-commerce, cloud, ads and subscription services under one platform. (finance.yahoo.com) 3/ On Energy Transfer, the current factual case is yield and cash returns. The partnership said on April 27 it raised its quarterly cash distribution to $0.3375 per common unit, or $1.35 annualized, payable May 20. Yahoo Finance’s quote page showed a forward dividend yield of about 6.65% at the May 22 close. (ir.energytransfer.com) 4/ That helps explain why ET shows up in “hold for decades” arguments. Midstream investors are usually buying for cash generation and distributions more than for explosive volume growth. Energy Transfer itself describes the business as one of the largest and most diversified midstream systems in the U.S. (energytransfer.com) 5/ The other piece of the ET argument is operating scale. Yahoo Finance’s stock page says Energy Transfer owns natural gas transportation and storage assets, including roughly 12,200 miles of intrastate pipelines and 20,090 miles of interstate pipelines. That is the kind of asset base long-horizon income investors tend to focus on. (finance.yahoo.com) 6/ But “20-year hold” for Energy Transfer also comes with specific caveats. It is a partnership, not a plain-vanilla C-corp, and distribution stories depend on commodity volumes, project execution, debt discipline and regulation. Energy Transfer’s own earnings materials include the usual forward-looking risk warnings around projects and outlook. (energytransfer.com) 7/ Amazon is the opposite side of the barbell. The long-term bull case is less about present yield and more about how many businesses sit inside the same company. Amazon’s 2025 annual report says service sales include third-party seller fees, AWS, advertising services, Prime membership fees and digital subscriptions. (sec.gov) 8/ That mix matters because it means Amazon is not just an online retailer. It is also a cloud provider, ad seller, logistics operator, subscription platform and marketplace toll collector. For a 20-year thesis, that diversification is usually the point. (sec.gov) 9/ The current Amazon numbers still support the “platform” framing. Amazon said in its fourth-quarter 2025 results that operating income rose to $25.0 billion in the quarter, while the company continued to call out special charges separately. The scale of earnings gives the company room to keep funding AI, logistics and cloud expansion. (sec.gov) 10/ AWS remains central to that story. Amazon’s public materials continue to position AWS as a core cloud infrastructure business, and Amazon has used AWS channels to highlight large-scale demand tied to Prime Day infrastructure, custom chips and AI workloads. (aws.amazon.com) 11/ So the Yahoo piece is really making a portfolio construction argument in plain language: pair a high-yield infrastructure name with a compounding technology platform. One is meant to throw off cash now; the other is meant to keep widening its earnings base over time. (finance.yahoo.com) 12/ The next hard checkpoints are company filings and earnings. Energy Transfer has already flagged its distribution increase and first-quarter 2026 reporting cycle, while Amazon’s latest SEC filings remain the cleanest place to watch sales mix, operating income and shareholder votes. (ir.energytransfer.com)