The long-term buy and hold strategy in ASX shares has been a good one for investors for a long time.
A soft quarter becomes less important, and what matters instead is whether a business will still be comfortably growing its earnings in 2036.
Here are three ASX 200 companies I think comfortably pass that test.
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Why I hold ASX shares for a decade
Time is one of the few advantages a retail investor has over a professional fund manager.
Nobody is grading my portfolio every quarter.
That freedom lets me own good businesses through the messy years when the market loses patience.
The three companies below each have a structural growth driver that should still be running long after this reporting season is forgotten.
Wesfarmers: the compounding machine
Wesfarmers Ltd (ASX: WES) may be the closest thing the local market has to a true compounder.
The company's half-year result delivered revenue of $24.2 billion and net profit after tax of $1.6 billion, up 9.3%.
The interim dividend rose 7.4% to 102 cents per share.
Bunnings did the heavy lifting again, with higher sales across every product category, region and customer segment.
Managing director Rob Scott said:
The result reflects strong operational performance and disciplined execution of the Group's strategies to create shareholder value.
The real appeal is capital allocation. Wesfarmers has repeatedly recycled cash out of mature businesses and into newer ones, moving from coal into lithium and health.
At today's prices the stock is not cheap on a price-to-earnings ratio in the low 30s.
But I would rather pay up for a management team that has proven it can redeploy capital sensibly across multiple cycles.
The conglomerate reports its FY26 numbers on 27 August.
Goodman Group: an industrial landlord turned power broker
Goodman Group (ASX: GMG) has become one of the most important data centre developers in the world.
The company's first-half result delivered $1.2 billion in operating profit. The group's power bank also expanded from 5GW to 6GW.
By June 2026, more than $14 billion of its roughly $18 billion work in progress is expected to be in data centre projects.
Founder and CEO Greg Goodman said of the strategy:
Power, sites and capital are critical to being able to service demand and provide delivery certainty.
Goodman owns scarce, powered land in exactly the cities where artificial intelligence infrastructure needs to be built.
The units are down roughly 16% over the past year, which strikes me as an opportunity rather than a warning sign.
Goodman reports its FY26 result today.
CSL: a reset year with a long runway
CSL Ltd (ASX: CSL) just posted the ugliest headline number in its ASX history.
FY26 revenue slipped 1% to US$15.8 billion, and impairments of US$7.1 billion pushed the company to a US$2.6 billion statutory loss. Underlying NPATA still landed at US$3.1 billion.
Investors looked past the write-downs to FY27 guidance of roughly 5% underlying profit growth, comfortably ahead of the 2% consensus.
The shares surged 17.9% on results day.
Interim CEO Gordon Naylor framed the year as a clearing of the decks:
CSL is positioned for a return to sustainable growth, supported by solid plasma market fundamentals.
Plasma collection remains a true moat, because it takes years and enormous amounts of capital to build a competing network of donor centres.
On top of that, a US$1 billion buyback and a flat US$2.92 dividend suggest management believes the worst is now behind it.
The risks of buying these ASX shares today
None of this is free money.
Wesfarmers carries a premium valuation that leaves little room for a consumer downturn.
Goodman is making enormous capital commitments into a data centre market that could eventually oversupply.
Meanwhile, CSL still has to prove Vifor can stabilise after guiding to a roughly 25% revenue decline.
Foolish takeaway
I am not trying to pick the best performers of the next 12 months, but to own businesses that will be much larger in 2036 than they are today.
Wesfarmers, Goodman Group and CSL each have a credible path to that outcome.
For patient investors interested in long-term compounding, that is the bar these ASX shares need to clear.
