3 Tech Stocks To Never Sell

But don’t worry – there is a way to make profits that doesn’t require timing the market perfectly, or changing up your portfolio every couple of months. Instead, simply by buying and holding stocks that perform consistently over time – and which are priced at a relatively fair valuation – you can minimize your risk profile while still getting a great return on your investment dollars.

 

The following 3 stocks are ideal candidates for the long-term investor, with each one providing high-quality exposure to an industry that’s expected to grow in coming years as well.

 

Founded in 1999, MercadoLibre (MELI) is the leading e-commerce company in Latin America.

 

Like its close competitor eBay, MELI serves as a marketplace for buyers and vendors, providing a platform that includes both live auction and fixed-price functionality. The company has made inroads into the mobile commerce business too, enabling users to connect through its iOS or Android app.

 

Given the diverse product portfolio it operates, MercadoLibre has managed to remain relevant by expanding into adjacent markets – such as when it acquired the Chilean payment services provider, Redelcom – giving the firm its first acquisition in the payments systems space, and expanding its footprint in the region.

The company recently announced an excellent set of fourth quarter results, having grown its revenues by 74% year-on-year to $2.1 billion, and driven up unique active users to 82.2 million.

 

MELI’s gross merchandise volume of $8.0 billion rose 32.2% on a currency neutral basis, while its marketplace live listings spiked to almost 300 million.

 

The firm’s logistics solutions wing, Mercado Envios, managed to ship 275.9 million items throughout the quarter, helping to generate a gross profit of $853.2 million.

At first glance, MercadoLibre appears to be a classic emerging market play, yet, for long-term investors, there’s reason to believe that its growth will remain strong for years to come. For instance, Latin America has an extremely low internet penetration rate, and, as more and more countries join its online marketplace, its sales should increase at a rapid clip.

 

Furthermore, many Latin American countries are becoming less dependent on developed economies like those of Europe and North America, and, as they become more economically independent from their trading partners on other continents, demand for local goods and services is likely to increase significantly.

 

Indeed, research suggests that retail e-commerce sales in the region will accelerate from $104 billion in 2022, to $160 billion in 2025.

 

MercadoLibre has many irons in the fire that will spur profits over the period, but its digital accounts division, which includes Cards transactions, transfers between Mercado Pago accounts, and wallet payments, has grown a massive 138.3% to deliver a total payment volume of $7.1 billion.

 

 

NVIDIA (NVDA) is a market leader in the design and manufacture of graphics processing units (GPUs) for the gaming, automotive and mobile computing markets. The company has seen huge growth recently as demand for its technology has soared the last few years.

 

The continued popularity of the computer gaming industry – as well as the rise of cryptocurrency mining and self-driving cars – grew the firm’s revenues to a record quarterly $7.64 billion, up 53% from the year before. Its fiscal-year revenue also broke records at $26.91 billion.

The technology company has plenty of growth opportunities on the horizon, what with the North America GPU market expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 31.76% between 2021 and 2028.

 

The global GPU market is also predicted to surpass 121,000 thousand units, accounting for a total market value of more than $80 billion by 2024. 

 

While NVDA’s GPUs are currently best known for their use in the IT, media, and telecommunication industries, its graphics cards are also likely to feature heavily in the roll out of the eagerly anticipated Metaverse concept.

 

Some commentators, including NVIDIA’s CEO, Jensen Huang, believe the Metaverse is going to be “larger than the economy in the physical world”, and naturally an important growth driver in the future.

But even if the Metaverse doesn’t quite turn out to be the multi-trillion dollar industry it’s predicted to become, NVDA still has many other sectors with the potential for big profits. Its artificial intelligence (AI) segment, for example, also represents a growing and significant portion of its business.

 

The company’s GPU accelerator chipsets are used to train almost 100% of all AI systems, and it has partnerships with companies such as Meta Platforms and Amazon.

 

In fact, in 2019, over 97% of all AI accelerator instances used by the world’s four largest cloud providers – Google, Azure, AWS and Alibaba – were deployed with NVIDIA GPUs. 

 

Indeed, Facebook is utilizing NVIDIA’s DGX A100 system to train its new AI supercomputer, Research SuperCluster, in natural-language processing, an endeavor that’s eventually expected to be applied within the emerging Metaverse setting itself.

 

San Francisco-based digital payments company Block (SQ) released its latest quarterly report last month, with the fintech business easily beating Wall Street’s revenue and net profit expectations. The firm’s shares soared 44% in the days following, as investors and analysts reacted positively to the news.  

And it’s not hard to see why. Revenue for the quarter came in at $4.08 billion, while Square’s Cash App product benefited from increased monetization, bringing in $518 million in gross profit, up 37% year-on-year.

 

Interestingly, revenue from Cash App’s bitcoin operations was a sizable $1.96 billion – nearly half the firm’s total revenue – but only constituted a relatively small $46 million in gross profit. However, Block’s Cash App doesn’t just let customers buy and sell BTC – it also works as a more general mobile payment service for its users too. 

 

Most notably – especially for long-term investors looking to hold Block stock for the foreseeable future – Square also acts as a digital bank for retailers, letting them manage their accounts online or via the mobile app, taking payments from customers, and transferring funds to merchants in the process. 

 

This functionality has helped attract millions of vendors to its service, and driven up its subscription and services-based revenue by 72% to $772 million. The recent acquisition of Afterpay – a buy now, pay later consumer credit company – has also added a further 16 million users to SQ’s books, which should enable it to funnel more customers into its various ecosystems, hopefully cross-selling more of its products further down the line.