When looking for long-term buy and hold investment options I think the mid cap space is a great place to start.
In this area of the market I believe there are many shares that have the potential to grow significantly in the future and potentially even become blue chips.
Three mid caps that I like right now are listed below, they are as follows:
Afterpay Touch Group Ltd (ASX: APT)
Afterpay Touch is a $1.8 billion payment solutions company that has disrupted the Australian retail sector with its buy now, pay later interest-free platform. While I do think that its business in Australia could be maturing now, if the company can replicate its success in the massive U.S. market then it could have an extremely bright future ahead of it. After all, the U.S. online fashion market is 20 times bigger than its Australian equivalent. In fact, one of the company's early partners in the United States, Urban Outfitters, generates sales of US$3 billion, which is roughly the same size as the entire Australian online retail market. One danger, though, is that if Afterpay Touch fails in the United States it may struggle to find sufficient future growth to justify the premium its shares trade at.
Appen Ltd (ASX: APX)
Appen is a $1.3 billion technology company operating in the lucrative machine learning and artificial intelligence markets by providing dataset services. It counts some of the biggest tech companies in the world such as Microsoft and Facebook amongst its customers, which I believe is a testament to the quality of the company. Strong demand for its services in the search and social categories means that full-year EBITDA is expected to hit the high-end of its $50 million to $55 million guidance range in FY 2018. If it does achieve the high-end of its guidance it will mean EBITDA growth of 95% year-on-year. With both machine learning and artificial intelligence markets expected to grow significantly over the next decade, Appen could be positioned perfectly to profit.
Webjet Limited (ASX: WEB)
With Australia experiencing an inbound and outbound tourism boom and the way these travels are booked shifting to online booking, I believe that online travel agents like Webjet are well positioned to generate strong organic growth over the next decade. While there are a number of options in the industry to choose from, this $1.6 billion online travel agent would have to be my favourite due to the way it continues to outpace industry booking growth. This recently led to the company delivering an impressive 45% increase in half-year net profit after tax before acquisition amortisation from its continuing operations.
