I Just Went All-In on Two Stocks. This Is the Second One.

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As of this week I run a two-stock portfolio. Oscar Health is number one. Mercado Libre is number two. Everything else is cash.

Let me explain the second position.

The Spawner Playing the Amazon Playbook

Mercado Libre is not an e-commerce company. That label is like calling Amazon a bookstore in 2005. It is a spawner, a business that builds one dominant platform and uses it to launch adjacent businesses that each become significant in their own right. Commerce spawned payments. Payments spawned credit. Credit spawned savings and insurance. Logistics was built to serve commerce and is now a competitive moat in its own right. Advertising grew from the data flywheel and is now growing at 67% year over year. Every layer feeds every other layer.

This is the Amazon playbook, executed in a market that is structurally a decade behind where the US was when Amazon’s compounding really began.

E-commerce penetration in Latin America sits at mid-teens percentage of total retail, exactly where the US was nine years ago, and the market is projected to grow 54% from $151 billion to $232 billion by 2028. But the US investor community is pricing MELI like a mature market business. It is not. It is the early innings of a secular shift across 650 million people.

The Fintech Opportunity Is Bigger Than the Commerce Business

In Mexico, less than half the population has a bank account and fewer than one in five has a credit card. Mercado Pago is financial infrastructure for the unbanked. Monthly active fintech users have grown close to 30% for ten consecutive quarters. The fintech user base surged 29% year over year to 72.2 million, driving assets under management up 89% to $15.1 billion. This is a second business inside the first business, growing faster than the first business.

The Numbers Behind the Thesis

Q4 2025 revenue grew 45% year over year to $8.8 billion. GMV reached $19.9 billion, up 37%. Items sold hit 752 million units in a single quarter, up 43%. The US e-commerce market is growing at 7-9% annually. MELI is growing at 45%. That gap reflects where the two markets are in their respective adoption curves.

The Oscar and MELI Pairing

These two positions are not correlated. Oscar is a US healthcare technology bet tied to regulatory individualization and ICHRA expansion. MELI is a Latin American commerce and fintech infrastructure bet tied to demographic growth, digital adoption, and financial inclusion. Different geographies. Different industries. Different secular tailwinds. Together they represent the most concentrated, highest-conviction expression of how I think about long-term wealth creation.

Both are category-defining companies in the early stages of becoming the dominant infrastructure of their respective markets. Both are run by founders or operators with skin in the game. Both are misunderstood by a market that cannot see past the next quarter.

The One Question That Matters

Will more people in Latin America shop online and use digital financial services in 2035 than they do today?

I believe they will. Significantly more. Demographics, digital adoption, smartphone penetration, and a growing middle class are not reversible trends. And Mercado Libre is the only platform in Latin America combining shopping, payments, credit, logistics, and advertising under one login. Nobody is rebuilding that from scratch.

Thanks for reading!

FJ

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