1 No-Brainer Buy and Hold Canadian Stocks

There is no such thing as a no-brainer investment. I discovered that the hard way. Indeed, it looks like many companies in the market are heading to new highs with solid momentum, week after week, quarter after quarter. Inevitably, one catalyst or the other can take such a stock off course and turn any given position into an exercise in patience.

I’m taking this approach for the markets heading into what I think could be a much more volatile 2026 than what we’ve experienced in the years since the pandemic began.

That said, I think so Fortis (TSX:FTS) is about as close to a no-brainer pick in today’s market for several reasons.

This is why I’m still very optimistic about this name heading into the new year, even after the impressive run shown above.

We need more power

What’s interesting about the economic growth we’ve seen in recent decades is that this growth is disproportionately the result of rising investments in new technologies. Name your technology, it doesn’t matter. If it beeps, buzzes, has a screen, or otherwise takes up people’s time, it will require significant back-end power.

The applications that have made our lives so much fun come at a cost. That is, we need increasing amounts of energy to not only provide the kind of AI and machine learning algorithms that most applications use, but also a lot of energy to store the data that already exists.

This insatiable demand for data has meant that companies like Fortis, which provide electricity and natural gas services to a mix of residential and commercial customers, are likely to find themselves in the economic sweet spot. If we can push regulators for bigger price increases to support network upgrades, while we’re all paying more for electricity, that means there’s one winner in this equation (and it’s not us).

However, investors can still win

While you and I may lament our ever-increasing energy bills, the reality is that Fortis’s incredible earnings growth, which I expect to see coming from these favorable economic conditions, will go straight back into investors’ pockets.

That’s because Fortis is not only a good steward of investor capital by deploying that capital for long-term upgrades that lead to higher profitability over time, but has also become one of the best dividend stocks on the market.

With one of the longest dividend growth streaks on the TSX and a still-solid dividend yield of 3.6%, this is a stock I think most investors would do well to buy here, and continue to grow over time.