I'm a fan of buy and hold investing and believe it is one of the best ways to grow your wealth.
To demonstrate just how successful this investment strategy can be with ASX 200 shares, I often like to see how much a single $20,000 investment in certain ASX 200 shares 10 years ago would be worth today.
Let's see how investments in these shares have fared during the past decade:
NextDC Ltd (ASX: NXT)
NextDC shares have been a great place to park your money over the past decade.
It has been growing at a consistently strong rate thanks to a combination of insatiable demand for data centre capacity and the ever-increasing footprint of its network. In respect to the latter, NextDC has been building data centres as quick as it can to capture the growing demand, which is being underpinned by the structural shift to the cloud and artificial intelligence
This has led to the ASX 200 share delivering a market-beating return of 26.6% per annum over the past 10 years. This would have turned a $20,000 investment in NextDC shares into ~$210,000 today.
Pilbara Minerals Ltd (ASX: PLS)
If you were brave enough to invest in Pilbara Minerals in 2014 when it was just a small cap, you would be very rich today.
Approximately 10 years ago, the lithium miner had just completed the acquisition of the Pilgangoora Project for a relatively trivial sum. Little did the company know that this project would become one of the world's more prominent lithium operations.
Though, its CEO of the time, Neil Biddle, certainly had high hopes for it. He said:
Together with the neighbouring Altura Mining deposit, Pilgangoora is almost certainly one of the largest hard rock tantalum-lithium deposits in the world and is a wonderful asset to have in our emerging Pilbara portfolio.
Since then, the ASX 200 share has delivered investors an average return of 63.8% per annum. This would have turned a very brave $20,000 investment into a staggering ~$2.75 million today.
Webjet Ltd (ASX: WEB)
Another ASX 200 share that has beaten the market over the past 10 years is online travel agent Webjet.
Thanks to the shift away from bricks and mortar travel booking to online booking and the emergence of its business-to-business WebBeds business, Webjet has delivered strong earnings growth since 2014.
This led to the company recording an average total return of 16.3% per annum over the period. This means that if you had invested $20,000 into its shares in 2014, your investment would now be worth ~$90,500.
