MELI is a strong long-term investment driven by fintech expansion, though it requires patience due to flat stock performance and current profit sacrifice for growth.

Next, I have to highlight Mercado Libre. It's the best company in all of South America. It is very similar to Amazon, but that's also where a lot of investors get it wrong.

It is true that Mercado Libre is a massive retail business, but its biggest difference from Amazon is that while Amazon focused on cloud hosting and retail, Mercado Libre is focused on the financial aspect.

And this is where this stock gets really interesting.

If we look at some of the KPIs here, one of them is the Fintech monthly active users. And this has been growing substantially. In 2024, they had 49 million monthly active Fintech users.

Now they have 88 million. It's also growing every single quarter. And a lot of this is credit card. So this is very different than Amazon, and it's also different in the growth profile than an Amazon.

The biggest differentiator is that Mercado Libre's total addressable market is not limited by Latin America's retail. It's not limited by Latin America online sales. It's now a much greater TAM.

The company now makes money anytime people spend or save or borrow or transfer money from one person to another. That is a very interesting bull case for this company and one that they're seizing.

The difficult part about Mercado Libre is like many of these companies that are highly ambitious and go for multiple huge verticals, investors have to wait. While the revenue continues to grow at a pace that we've never seen before for any company ever, we also have the stock price relatively flat for the past 5 years.

That is because of both it being overpriced, like many companies in 2021, but also they're sacrificing their short-term economics and profitability to get more growth. So investors in this company need to be patient, but the prize is likely huge.

And building up both a massive banking and Fintech company in Latin America, as well as the biggest retailer.