millionaire

Retirement can be incredibly expensive, and with many Americans’ finances stretched thin right now, it can be tough to save anything at all for the future.

Investing in the stock market is one of the most effective ways to grow your savings, and you don’t need a lot of cash to get started. In fact, it’s possible to retire with $1 million or more with just $10 per day. Here’s how.

Building long-term wealth in the stock market

Investing doesn’t have to mean spending countless hours researching and building a portfolio full of individual stocks. Contributing to your 401(k) or IRA can be a more approachable way to invest, and you can earn far more with this strategy than stashing your spare cash in a savings account.

Image source: Getty Images.

While investing can seem daunting and risky, it’s safer than you might think. Mutual funds and index funds can carry less risk than many other types of investments, and depending on where you buy, they can also be more protected against market volatility.

Whether you’re investing in a 401(k), IRA, or other type of retirement account, consistency is key. These types of investments thrive over decades thanks to compound earnings, as you earn gains on your entire account balance rather than just the amount you’ve invested.

Over time, compound earnings can have a snowball effect on your savings. The more you earn on your investments, the greater your account balance will grow, and you’ll earn even more. By giving your money as much time as possible to build, you can accumulate $1 million or more while barely lifting a finger.

Turning $10 per day into $1 million or more

Exactly how much you can earn in the stock market will depend on where you invest, but historically, the market itself has earned an average rate of return of around 10% per year over the last 50 years.

That’s not to say you’ll necessarily earn 10% returns every single year. Some years, you’ll earn much higher-than-average returns — like in 2024, for example, when the S&P 500 earned total returns of more than 23%. Other years, though, you’ll earn lower or even negative returns. Over decades, those ups and downs have historically averaged out to roughly 10% per year.

Let’s say your investments are in line with the market’s long-term performance, earning returns of 10% per year, on average. If you were to invest $10 per day — or around $300 per month — here’s approximately how much you could accumulate over time.

Data source: Author’s calculations via investor.gov.

In this scenario, it would take just over 35 years to reach the $1 million mark. But if you have even a few extra years to invest or can afford to contribute more than $10 per day, you can earn exponentially more in total.

For example, say that you can afford to invest $15 per day, or roughly $450 per month. If you’re still earning an average annual return of 10%, those contributions would add up to more than $2.3 million after 40 years.

No matter how much you can contribute each day or month, getting started investing as early as possible is key. The more consistently you invest, the easier it will be to retire a millionaire.

What does it take to become a millionaire investor? You could bet everything on one stock and pray that it works out well. Or you could build a diversified portfolio that includes both reliable stocks and riskier, more growth-oriented choices. The second option is likely to be the best one for most investors.

And, if you go that route, you’ll want to consider beverage king Coca-Cola (KO 1.02%) as you look to build a seven-figure nest egg.

What does Coca-Cola do?

Coca-Cola is one of the largest consumer staples companies on the planet, with a market capitalization of around $280 billion. The company’s namesake brand is iconic and well known in countries around the world, though it is really just one of the many beverage products Coca-Cola sells.

From a big-picture perspective, the products Coca-Cola produces are really luxury items. You could just drink free tap water instead of paying far more for a soda. However, the cost of a soda, or any of the other branded beverages the company sells, is modest. So, in effect, Coca-Cola is selling an affordable luxury that most people are loath to give up even during hard times, like recessions.

Thus, Coca-Cola’s business tends to be very resilient. That’s highlighted by its status as a Dividend King, with more than 60 years’ worth of annual dividend increases backing its roughly 3.1% dividend yield. Without getting into details, Coca-Cola stands toe to toe with any consumer staples company when it comes to the strength of its business.

It can be a reliable foundation for a diversified millionaire-making portfolio. It allows you to stack higher-growth, riskier investments on top of it without having to fear that you will lose it all by taking on too many risky bets.

Why buy Coca-Cola now?

Coca-Cola is a well-run company and it doesn’t go on sale very often. When it does get put on the discount rack, the sale is usually pretty modest. Don’t go into a valuation analysis here expecting to find a deep discount. But that doesn’t mean there is no discount.

For starters, Coca-Cola’s 3.1% dividend yield is quite attractive on a comparative basis. One vital reference point is the skinny 1.2% yield of the S&P 500 index. But the yield is also well above the 2.7% average yield for the consumer staples sector as a whole. On a relative basis, Coca-Cola’s dividend yield suggests it is trading at an attractive price for long-term investors.

That fact is backed up by more traditional valuation metrics. For example, Coca-Cola’s price-to-sales ratio is currently around 6.1 versus a five-year average of roughly 6.3. That’s not a huge discount, per se, but it is cheaper than normal. The price-to-earnings ratio shows the same trend, with the current figure at about 23.5 compared to a five-year average of nearly 27. A fair to slightly discounted price for a company like Coca-Cola is a pretty good long-term investment opportunity.

Build your million-dollar portfolio from the ground up

Coca-Cola isn’t likely to get you to millionaire status all by itself. And even if it did, the process would likely require decades to play out. However, you probably shouldn’t be buying a single stock and hoping to hit it rich. You should spread your bets out, with some more risky ones and some more conservative ones, like Coca-Cola.

Coca-Cola isn’t an exciting growth stock. Coca-Cola isn’t a dirt cheap turnaround story. It is a boring company that can be expected to grow slowly and steadily over time while spitting out a reliable and growing dividend. And that is the foundation on which you can build out a much more interesting millionaire-making portfolio.

Some of the biggest winners in the stock market over the last three years have been companies riding the rising wave of generative artificial intelligence.

Palantir (PLTR -5.39%), with its artificial intelligence platform, has seen its stock rise by over 2,000% in three years. Nvidia (NVDA -4.84%), the poster child for AI chipmakers, is up by more than 1,300% in the same period. And neo-cloud providers like Nebius Group (NBIS -2.37%) and CoreWeave (CRWV -3.32%) have soared by triple-digit percentages since their IPOs.

If you had invested $10,000 in any one of these big winners ahead of their surges, you’d be well on the way to having a million-dollar holding in the long term, even if they produce merely average returns from here on out. But identifying which companies will be a new technology’s big winners ahead of time is difficult. If it were easy, everyone would be rich.

If you’d like to profit from the ongoing growth of AI, you could put a little bit of money into a lot of different AI stocks, or you could buy an ETF that specializes in finding generative AI opportunities. That’s what the Roundhill Generative AI & Technology ETF (CHAT -5.03%) does. Investors who are still trying to strike it rich with generative AI stocks may find it a compelling alternative to attempting to pick individual AI stocks themselves.

Image source: Getty Images.

Looking under the hood

The Roundhill team is focused on building a portfolio of companies that are actively involved in the advancement of generative AI. Its holdings include companies developing their own large language models and generative AI tools, companies providing key infrastructure for training and inference, and software companies commercializing generative AI applications.

Since it’s an ETF, investors can see exactly what the fund holds. Here are the largest holdings in the portfolio as of this writing.

• Nvidia
• Alphabet
• Oracle
• Microsoft
• Meta Platforms
• Broadcom
• Tencent Holdings
• Alibaba Group Holdings
• ARM Holdings
• Amazon

There aren’t a lot of surprises in the list. Perhaps the biggest standout is Arm, which is relatively small compared to the other tech giants with large weightings in the portfolio. Still, its market cap comes in at a healthy $165 billion.

In total, the ETF holds 40 stocks and several currency hedges for foreign-issued shares as of this writing. That diversification gives it a good chance of holding a few companies that will be big winners from here, which may be all it takes to produce market-beating returns. Indeed, the portfolio includes some of the best-performing stocks of 2025, including Palantir.

Since its inception in 2023, the Roundhill Generative AI & Technology ETF has returned an impressive 148% compared to a 66% total return from the S&P 500. And that’s factoring in the drag of the ETF’s 0.75% expense ratio.

Could $10,000 invested make you a millionaire?

In order to turn $10,000 into $1 million, the ETF would have to increase in value 100-fold. That may be difficult, considering the current sizes of its top holdings.

Nearly one-third of the portfolio is invested in companies with market caps exceeding $1 trillion, and the larger a company becomes, the more raw growth it takes to move the needle on its size on a percentage basis. For Nvidia to grow by even 25% now would be the equivalent of creating a whole new trillion-dollar business. And while such growth is certainly possible for some of those megacap companies, there’s still a finite amount of money in the global economy.

Meanwhile, there are only a handful of relatively small businesses in the ETF’s portfolio that could reasonably be expected to multiply in size significantly.

Additionally, many stocks in the portfolio have high valuations. Palantir shares trade for a forward P/E ratio of 280. Nebius trades for 54 times expected sales. Even CoreWeave’s sales multiple of 12.5 looks expensive, given its reliance on debt to continue growing. That said, some of the best performers of the last few years also looked expensive a few years ago (including Palantir and Nvidia). Still, the expected return of stocks with such high valuations isn’t going to be as high as those offering more compelling values.

As such, it seems unlikely the Roundhill Generative AI & Technology ETF will produce returns strong enough to turn $10,000 into $1 million over a reasonable time frame. That doesn’t mean that it’s not worth owning. For investors looking to gain exposure to the generative AI trend without going all in on one or two stocks, buying the Roundhill Generative AI & Technology ETF is a simple way to do that.