Although putting $1,000 into the share market may not seem like a life-changing sum of money to invest, if you are able to do it periodically over a long enough time frame, it could grow materially.
For example, over the last 30 years the Australian share market has provided a return of 9.1% per annum on average.
This means that if you had invested $1,000 every second month, bringing your total annual investment to $6,000, your investments would have grown to be worth approximately $910,000 today if it achieved the market return.
With that in mind, here are three shares that I think would be great options for that first $1,000 investment:
Appen Ltd (ASX: APX)
Given its exposure to the fast-growing machine learning and artificial intelligence markets, I believe Appen has the potential to be a very rewarding long-term investment. It looks set to benefit greatly from this growth as it has carved itself out a leadership position in the development of high-quality, human-annotated training data for machine learning and artificial intelligence. In addition to this, I believe recent acquisitions have positioned it perfectly to increase its margins meaningfully over the next few years and support further above-average profit growth.
CSL Limited (ASX: CSL)
I think this biotherapeutics giant would be a great buy and hold option for investors. Although its shares trade at a premium to the market average, I believe they deserve to because the long term growth prospects for both its CSL Behring and Seqirus businesses are outstanding. This is down to their talented leadership and research teams, their lucrative portfolio of products under development, and strong demand for their current products.
Nanosonics Ltd (ASX: NAN)
As with CSL, this infection control specialist's shares trade at a material premium to the market average. However, whilst I would love to buy them at a much cheaper price, I don't think it will matter too much in the long run if you're planning to hold its shares for the next decade or more. This is because I feel Nanosonics has the potential to grow significantly in the future thanks to the increasing popularity of its trophon EPR disinfection system for ultrasound probes and management's plan to launch new products targeting other unmet needs in the near term.
