While a $10,000 investment may not seem like much in the grand scheme of things, I think it is important to understand the potential rewards of making that same investment in the market for 30 successive years.
According to research by Fidelity, as of the end of 2017 the Australian share market had provided an average annual return of 9.1% over the last three decades.
This means that if you had matched this return and invested $10,000 each year for 30 years, it would have grown to be worth approximately $1.5 million today.
While there is no guarantee that the market will provide an average return of 9.1% again over next 30 years, I'm optimistic that it will.
With that in mind, here are three shares I would consider investing the first $10,000 into.
Appen Ltd (ASX: APX)
Although I think its shares are about fair value now and may have limited upside in the near term, I believe the developer of high-quality, human annotated datasets for machine learning and artificial intelligence has an incredibly bright future that could result in it growing significantly over the next decade. This is because the machine learning and artificial intelligence markets that it has a leading position in are expected to grow at an explosive rate over the coming years. The global machine learning market, for example, is expected to grow from US$1.41 billion in 2017 to US$8.81 billion by 2022 according to Forbes. Similarly strong growth is expected for the AI market. According to Statista, it is expected to grow from US$8.3 billion in 2018 to approximately US$90 billion by 2025.
Corporate Travel Management Ltd (ASX: CTD)
I think that this corporate travel manager could be a great option for investors. During earnings season Corporate Travel Management delivered a 14% lift in revenue to $372.2 million and a 34% increase in underlying net profit after tax to $86 million. Pleasingly, I feel that the company can continue this strong form for some time to come thanks to its long runway for growth. For example, although the company is generating sizeable revenues, management estimates that the company only has a 15% share of the ANZ market, a 2% share of the Asia market, and under 1% of both the European and US markets.
ResMed Inc. (ASX: RMD)
ResMed is one of the world's leading sleep treatment companies and well worth considering as a buy and hold investment. Due to the quality of its products and its wide distribution network, I believe it is in a strong position to win a growing share of a market that is tipped to grow at a robust rate over the next decade. Furthermore, I expect that management's focus on the fast-growing cloud-connected medical device market will support the growth of its core business in the coming years.
