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When I look at a list of the day's most active stocks, I see the usual big-name tycoons like Nvidia, Tesla, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) near the top. But if I had to pick one stock I'd feel comfortable holding for the next five years, I'd choose Microsoft, and I'd choose it specifically because of what's happening underneath all that daily trading activity, not because of the activity itself.
Microsoft trades an average of roughly 27 million shares a day, according to Yahoo! Finance. That's real volume, but it's a fraction of what moves through some of its most active peers. According to various stock trackers, Nvidia alone averages over 120 million shares daily. Tesla runs around 41 million. Apple sits near 55 million. All five of these stocks show up on the most active lists for a similar reason: they're mega caps that sit inside nearly every major index fund and ETF, so any time money flows into or out of the S&P 500 or the Nasdaq, all five get swept along with it, Microsoft included. There's nothing wrong with watching that volume. Most of it is just short-term money bouncing around a handful of familiar tickers.
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When I ask myself what to actually hold, I want a company that can turn today's trading noise into long-term cash flow. Microsoft is often near the top of the most active lists, yet the underlying business looks built for a five-year holding period, not a five-minute scalp.
In its most recent quarter, fiscal Q4 2026, Microsoft reported revenue of $90 billion, up 18% year over year, with Microsoft Cloud revenue climbing 27% to $59.3 billion. Azure, its core cloud platform, grew 43%, beating analyst expectations, as more enterprises plugged AI workloads into the infrastructure they already had running on Microsoft's servers. For the full fiscal year, Azure topped $100 billion in revenue for the first time, growing 41%, and total Microsoft Cloud revenue for the year came in above $214 billion. Those are the kind of numbers that help me see past the daily share-volume noise and into the actual engine driving the stock.
What really makes Microsoft stand out to me is how directly it's wiring itself into the AI and cloud story, and how much money it's putting behind that bet. Management guided to roughly $175 billion of capital expenditure for calendar 2026, a figure the company revised down from an earlier $190 billion estimate as it refined its accounting treatment for the mix of owned data centers versus leased capacity. In the most recent quarter alone, capital expenditures and finance leases totaled $41 billion, up 69% year over year, as CFO Amy Hood confirmed on the earnings call. That's an enormous sum of money going into GPUs, data centers, and the physical infrastructure AI workloads actually run on.
Spending that much only makes sense if there is demand. Microsoft's AI business now generates an annual revenue run rate above $37 billion, up 123% from a year earlier, as companies embed its models into everything from Office to GitHub's developer tools. Commercial bookings grew 18% even after stripping out the impact of Microsoft's OpenAI relationship, and commercial remaining performance obligations, essentially revenue that's already been contracted but not yet delivered, grew 84% to $678 billion. Even excluding OpenAI entirely, that backlog still grew 25%. In plain terms, that means customers across a broad range of industries are signing multiyear agreements with Microsoft well beyond what any single AI partnership would account for, and about 30% of that backlog is set to convert into revenue over the next 12 months.
When I think about what I want from a five-year holding, that combination, heavy investment paired with a growing, broadly sourced backlog of already-signed business, matters more to me than today's trading volume ever could.
So, let's recap a bit. What does all this mean? Trading volume just measures attention, how many shares change hands today, not whether a company is worth owning five years from now. And that capex "cut" isn't really a cut at all; Microsoft is spreading the cost of its buildings over more years on paper, which lowers the number it reports without lowering what it actually spends. Both are worth knowing, because both get misread constantly.
I won't wave away the real worries. The stock fell 15% to 20% at points in 2026 on fears that AI spending had gotten ahead of itself, and $175 billion is still a massive bet that could look oversized if demand ever cools. But Azure keeps outgrowing the broader cloud market, and that $678 billion backlog tells me customers are signing multiyear commitments.
That's why I'd forget the volume and hold Microsoft anyway. The ticker will keep flashing every day as traders chase whatever's moving but behind that screen sits a business with hundreds of billions in revenue and a contracted backlog most companies could only dream of.
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Micah Zimmerman has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Forget Chasing Volume. Here's the Most Active Stock I'd Actually Hold for 5 Years. was originally published by The Motley Fool
