Investing for retirement can be intimidating, especially if your goal is to have at least $1 million saved when you retire. Most people opt to buy index funds because they don't feel like they know enough to pick the best individual stocks themselves. That can work too, but sometimes you need the performance of individual stocks to help you outpace the index funds and give your retirement fund a much-needed boost.

Finding great individual stocks to buy and hold for the next few decades gets easier if you keep a few things in mind like growth opportunities, network effects, strategic position, and cash flow generation (see below). Here are four stocks I think would make great buy-and-hold candidates to get your retirement fund above that magical $1 million threshold: (NASDAQ: GOOG) (NASDAQ: GOOGL), Airbnb (NASDAQ: ABNB), MGM Resorts (NYSE: MGM), and Disney (NYSE: DIS).

Let's find out what makes these four individual stocks worth further consideration.

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Source Fool.com