Growth & Tech Investing Strategy For 2026

Investing Group Leaders Andrés Cardenal and Beth Kindig dive into the high-octane growth themes and disruptive innovation trends defining the market in 2026. Discover their top high-conviction stock ideas and gain insights into how to identify the next generation of tech leaders shaping the future of the digital economy.Join The Data Driven Investor Today!Follow Andrés Cardenal on Seeking Alpha!Join Tech Insider Network Today!Follow Beth Kindig on Seeking Alpha!This video's transcript was generated by a third party. It is not curated or reviewed and is provided for convenience and information purposes only. The accuracy and completeness of the transcript are not guaranteed.Daniel Snyder: Welcome back, everyone, to Investing Experts Live. Top ideas for 2026. Obviously, if you were tuning in to the first session today with Rena, Steven, and Samuel, you got a deep dive into the world of Yield and some great ideas from both of them. Now, we're transitioning here to the exciting growth story of AI and data and growth focus for the remainder of the session in today's event. And we're going to be joined by Andre Cardinal and Beth Kindig. You may know them from the Data Driven Investor and Tech Insider Network. But before we dive into conversation, stick with me for one second. We just need to get a quick legal disclaimer out of the way for you.Past performance is no guarantee for future results. Any views or opinions expressed may not reflect those of Seeking Alpha as a whole. The accuracy and completeness of content shared during the event cannot be guaranteed. Content is offered for information purposes only. All event participants must comply with Seeking Alpha's event policy. Analysts, investing group leaders, and other third parties participating in the event include both professional investors and individual investors who may not be licensed or certified by any institute or regulatory body. Seeking Alpha does not take account of your objectives or financial situation and does not offer any personalized investment advice. Seeking Alpha is not a licensed securities dealer, broker, US investment adviser, or investment bank.Alright. Now with that out of the way, I'm excited to dive into the conversation over this next hour and a half all the way till 3:00 PM today to dive in with Andre and Beth and present you all with their top idea for the year. So kicking things off here with Beth, I would love to start things off. People know you. They know Tech Insider Network. You've been writing for many, many years about the AI boom and technology and the winners, and you have had great performance. But, obviously, AI, are we overvalued? Where do we go from here? Is the energy constraint too much?What is going to happen with geopolitical tensions here in the world of AI? Whose model's going to win? Any thoughts on just a macroeconomic scale to just start leveling the playing field here today?Beth Kindig: Thanks, Daniel. There are so many questions to answer when it comes to AI, and those are really great questions to ask. I think the big picture remains what's being spent. Is there demand? And today, you're going to hear more from me on that topic, which is where are the supply constraints. Wherever there is a supply constraint, there is an opportunity for an investor is my opinion. We do have a macro person on our team. And as we look through 2026, clearly, macro will never cooperate on a year-long outlook. It changes very frequently. But we do actually believe that we could see a correction in AI stocks, which is one reason why we have a cash allocation right now.We love buying lower. We have no problem with AI stocks selling off and buying them lower, meaning the long term trend is completely intact here. And for me, it's a buy on dips. And even with a correction, for me, the bigger picture is the outsized demand. That's exactly what you want to see. You want to avoid markets where there's an oversupply. That's the opposite of what I'm seeing in AI right now.DS: All right. Now over to you, Andre. I want to ask you. So you're the data driven investor, as many of us are aware, and there's been a lot of geopolitical tensions so far already this year and last year. Everybody's looking at Venezuela.They're looking at what's still going on in Ukraine. They're looking all across the board with Greenland and trade wars and trade deals and so many various factors going on at this moment in time. So what is the data showing you? Are those the big worries for this year, or are you focused on something else?Andrés Cardenal: Hello, Daniel. Thank you very much for having me. Yeah. I agree with what Beth said. I think we're in a powerful bull market, a long-term bull market. And when I look at inflation rates, when I look at economic activity, when I look at profit margins, the economy is cooperating very well. That notwithstanding, the main problem in the market is often the lack of fear. So if the bull market continues, which I think it will, it's going to have some sharp corrections along the way. And the biggest risk factor for this environment, I think, is what you just mentioned. The situation in Iran is tragic.I mean, in China, we're also seeing some, you know, uncertainty regarding military leadership. So, this is, an area that can create lots of concerns. Generally speaking, it is, low probability risk that, military conflict will escalate, But it is, in my mind, the most concerning factor because the economy is going to do well this year. So I think that geopolitical risk is the main risk factor that we need to watch very closely.DS: Alright. And now with that out of the way, everybody obviously is not here to listen to me. So I'm going to go ahead and step back here. Andre, we're going to come back to you. I would love for you to go ahead and present your top idea for 2026.AC: Of course. So my best idea for 2026 is MercadoLibre. This means free market in Spanish. The company is the market leader in ecommerce and fintech in Latin America. It also has the strongest distribution network, the biggest logistics network in the in the region.Our value is a very high quality business. The business is protected by multiple sources of competitive moat, Meaning, first and foremost, the logistics network is unparalleled. You can basically get products from a delivery delivered in some corners of the Amazonian jungle or in the top of a mountain in Chile or in Argentina. In addition to this, it has the network effect, meaning that buyers and sellers attract each other to the platform. So if you're a merchant, you want to go where the public is.And if you are buying something, you want to go where the supply is. The same happens in fintech. I mean, if you have a digital wallet, you want this digital wallet to be accepted everywhere. And merchants need to accept the payment platforms that bring more customers to the store. So the bigger the company, the stronger the product, and the more value it creates for users.This builds up self-sustaining virtuous cycle for the company. And it has the brand. I mean, MercadoLibre is the most recognized, the most valuable brand in Latin America according to Cantor. And when you buy something over, you know that you can expect delivery to happen on time. You know then you can pay safely, which is very, very important in Latin America.And you know that if there is anything wrong with the product, quality terms and forth, takes care of the returns. So this reduces friction. This creates trust and makes MercadoLibre a unique company in this sector. The business is growing at full speed, record breaking speed, in fact, and has enormous room for long term growth. When we think about ecommerce, we think about fintech in The United States.You know, those are competitive industries. And, I mean, they still have a lot of room for growth. But in Latin America, market penetrations are much lower, which means years and even decades of growth from recovery ahead. And because margins are contracting margins are contracting for very good reasons, in my opinion, the stock is currently trading at historically attracting valuation levels. So let's begin with top line growth.MercadoLibre is the only public listed company in the world among more than 83,000 companies that has delivered revenue growth above 30% for more than twenty seven consecutive quarters. We can see the numbers in this slide. And you can see that the 39% increase in the most recent quarter, the 2025, is an acceleration versus prior quarters, 35%, 37%, 34%, 39% this quarter. Now swinging to some recent indicators.Revenue growing at 39% in U.S. dollars, 49% in constant currencies, GMV expanding at 28%, which is 35% in constant currencies, Items sold increased 39% and TPV in fintech increasing at 41% in US dollars and 54% in constant currencies. The size of the paid portfolio expanded by 83% versus the same quarter in the prior year, reaching 11 billion. Looking at some key indicators. So unique buyers in commerce is the oldest, the most mature metric for my because the company started as an ecommerce platform and then it built the fintechs business.Well, it grew the user base by 26%. This is an acceleration versus credit quarters. You can see '21, '24, '25, '25 and now '26. It has 76.8 million customers. So, if it were a country, MercadoLibre would be bigger than all of the individual countries in Latin America except for Mexico and Brazil, which are the two biggest countries.Fintech platform growing at 29% and reaching 72.2 million users. Then again, because revenue is growing very rapidly, TPV is increasing 41% in fintech. So, we know that the monetization of this user base in fintech is absolutely exploding. Assets under management increased 89%, reaching 15 billion, and the size of the great portfolio grew 83% during the quarter, reaching 11 billion. So, the company is doing outstandingly well on the top line.Bad news for short-term focused investors is that profit margins have been contracting recently. The operating profit margin is down from 10.5% in the 2024 to 9.8% in the 2025. And net income margin is down from 7.5% to 5.7%. Now this is a crucial clarification in investment thesis. Why are margins contracting?Because management is doing the right thing by investing for sustained long term growth as opposed to focusing too much on margins in a particular quarter. Here are some of the initiatives that is taking. This is why margins are contracting, and this is why the company is growing so rapidly. In Brazil, for example, the company reduced their free shipping threshold from BRL79 to BRL19. This obviously has a negative impact on margins short term. But how is the top line responding to this?Unique buyers in Brazil had the biggest increase ever in absolute terms, even faster than in the pandemic. Sold items grew 42%, and GMV increased 34% in currency neutral basis. Customers are happier than air, market share gains and record customer satisfaction in Brazil. Now, this is also very important.Because of carrier utilization of per capacity, shipping costs per unit in Brazil declined by 8%, which is a massive decline. The bigger the size of the logistics network, the higher the occupation, the more efficiency it has, the lower the cost per unit, which consolidates the competitive advantage around the business. Also, in fintech, there was an increase in funding cost in in the 2025 in Argentina because Argentina had its midterm elections, and there was a lot of currency volatility in anticipation of those elections. So the government had to increase the interest rates very sharply to contain this volatility. What did happen was that the incumbent party, Javier Milei's La Libertad Avanza party won the elections.So, the currency markets are now stable in Argentina, and interest rates are declining. So a large part of this increase was temporary. It's already in the past. Also, the company is aggressively expanding the credit portfolio like we saw in in various slides, growing 83%. And for accounting reasons, when you issue over, for example, a new credit card, the company needs to provision the bad debt upfront and then invest the money with the interest payments.So margins decline because you issue a lot of credit cards, and those credit cuts, you need to record the expenses first, and then you record the profits. Now why is MercadoLibre expanding so rapidly, the size of the credit portfolio? Because they are already seeing that in Brazil, which is the oldest country, the oldest market in Kuwait, the most mature market, cohorts the older cohorts are exceedingly profitable, more profitable than they expected. So they see, okay. This is working.We're putting new money after good money. We know that this business is being profitable. We're underwriting the credit in the right way. In Mexico, for example, which is a huge market, credit is enormously under penetrated. So there is a massive, massive opportunity to democratize financial services in in countries such as Mexico, Argentina, which have very low credit penetration.So the point is that net interest margins fluctuate in specific quarters depending on how much credit the company is giving because they need to provision for expenses upfront. But structurally speaking, we're looking at mature cohorts. The business is going to be very profitable. Importantly, because MercadoLibre has access to enormously valuable data about consumer spending and business sales. Again, about the credit flywheel because, you know, Wall Street after the 2018 crisis, Wall Street analysts tend to be concerned when they see a rapid expansion in in credit portfolio. But this great business is not only a strong source of profitability for the company, but also a key strategic asset.For example, two out of three entrepreneurs that made their first investment ever via MercadoLibre, and 60% of the ones who received credit had their first credit ever from the company. So these are customers which the traditional banks cannot serve. So if you're a merchant in Brazil, you are you have a growing business and you get your first credit for MercadoLibre, there is a big chance that you are going to be a customer of the company forever because you are going to be a customer in investments, in all kind of credit products, in ecommerce, of course, in insurance. I mean, there's a lot of cross selling opportunities.And MercadoLibre in fintech has an enormous advantage based on the traditional banks. For example, if you are a legacy bank in Brazil or in any country in Latin America for that matter, for example, how do you gain new customers? Well, you need to have branches, physical branches. You need to have lots of employees, lot of paperwork. You need to do a lot of advertising.For MercadoLibre, instead, it's very simple. You have someone which you send your app every day. Basically, in many countries in Latin America, you use the app every day. And you know that this person is a good credit. So you offer this person a credit card via the app.It's still expensive. And if you are the consumer, you say, okay. I pay zero to get this credit card, and I get to postpone my expenditures. I get discounts. I get payments installments without interest rates, which is quite important in countries where inflation is higher and interest rate is also higher.So, the company can serve segments of the population that a big bank cannot serve because a big bank has very high customer acquisition cost. America has almost zero customer acquisition cost in the credit business. Credit quality is as strong as ever. We're improving. And, again, this decision to provide more free shipping in Brazil.It is not only working very well and driving accelerating growth in the company's oldest and most mature market. It is strengthening the size of the moat.

In Latin America, in many cases, you do not have alternative logistics network that can provide anything similar to what MercadoLibre has. In some cases, you have some small private carriers, and sometimes you will need to rely on government owned carriers, which are, you know, not reliable at all. So this decision to provide more for customers, to make customers happier, it's not only accelerating growth, but it's only building a stronger business for the long term, which is exactly what the company needs to do at this stage.It also has a huge opportunity in advertising because MercadoLibre is right at the point where you make the purchase decisions. Advertising is a very high margin business, just getting started, growing at 63% in the most recent quarter. And, I mean, we talk a lot about AI companies, and I'm very bullish on many of the AI infrastructure companies. But we should not forget about companies like, which are AI implementation companies. These are companies that are going to be distributing AI into a lot of businesses.In logistics, it's going to be much more efficient because of AI. Well, business to say, software building, I mean, coding is going to be much more efficient, and it's a big expense for the company. And advertising, is just getting started in the advertising business. And AI applications to advertising are going to drive massive growth because Mercado is right at the point where you make the purchase decision. Let alone, for example, shopping agents.I mean, the company has not announced anything yet, but we have seen Amazon and Shopify are already moving into buying agents. And I think it's only a matter of time until we see something similar from a colleague, and it's going to drive a lot of customer attention in my opinion.Now the big picture. E-commerce in Latin America is only 15% of retail sales.

In The United States, it's 30%, and in China, it's almost 40%. And it's not only much bigger in other countries, but it's still growing. So it's unavoidable. Over time, e-commerce is going to double its penetration as a share of retail sales in Latin America, and it's going to continue growing from there. It will not stop at 30. So, this is why I am pretty sure that management is doing exactly what it needs to do to make sure that MercadoLibre remains the undisputed leader in this huge opportunity.Look, for example, at fintech. In Mexico, only 11% of the population has a credit card. Less than 50% of the population has a bank account. And I live in Argentina. I can tell you from a boots on the ground perspective.A lot of people here, they don't have formal jobs or they don't have a high salary. They don't have bank accounts, but they have an account in MercadoLibre because they need to get the money transferred. It's much safer instead of paying something with cash in neighborhoods, which are dangerous. You can pay with your with your phone, and you don't need to take so much risk. So a lot of segments of the population, especially young segments of the population, are getting their first ever access to financial services via Mercado Pago.And, again, these customers are going to be customers of the company for life. So the room to monetize this customer base is gigantic in great, in investment products, in advertising, e-commerce, in insurance, just getting started. Now, looking at valuation, we see the stock price in purple, revenue in orange, and free cash flow per share in blue. As we know, if the business fundamentals are doing well, the stock price follows in the same direction. However, this relationship is not always straightforward. Right?For example, during the pandemic, interest rates were at zero and growth was accelerating. The stock price outperformed the fundamentals. More recently, however, fundamentals are doing better than ever, but the stock price has pulled back because of this compression in profit margins, this expansion into credit, which is generating some concerns among investors. In terms of enterprise value to revenue, the stock is trading at around four.We're used to trade at more than double this valuation. And again, sure, you can say, well, but growth is going to slow down, so it deserves to trade at discounted valuation. Well, let me tell you. Sure. You can expect growth to slow down eventually, but it has not slowed down much in recent quarters.And from a competitive point of view, in terms of business quality, MercadoLibre is stronger than ever. And if we look at prior to free cash flow, prior to operating cash flow, the stock trades at less than 16 times free cash flow, which is, in my opinion, too cheap for a business of this quality, less than 14 times operating cash flow. With a company such as MercadoLibre, you will need to be careful when you look at the cash flows because it loans money and it lends money. So perhaps in a specific quarter, you can have some exceptional fluctuations in in cash flows. However, when I look at the past 12 months, you have a free cash flow margin of around 24%, which is quite conservative in my opinion in terms of measuring sustainable cash flow generation.I think that free cash flow margin for MercadoLibre is going to be above 25 in the future. So current cash flows, in my opinion, represent a good fundamental metric for the company. I think it's exceptionally cheap at current prices. Summing up, MercadoLibre is a generational compounder with enormous room for sustained growth in Latin America because it's the market leader with strong moat in markets which are deeply underpenetrated, high quality business with, I have to say, the best management team in Latin America by far, far distance. And the stock is historically undervalued because the market is concerned about short term margin pressure.However, management is doing the right thing by focusing on long term value creation instead of focusing too much on short term profit margins. And this short term uncertainty affecting the stock is a source of long term opportunity for investors in MercadoLibre. That's all I have to say.Daniel Snyder:Alright, Andres. Thank you so much for that great presentation. I will say I see people in the chat here already saying that they're buying into what you're selling. Great thesis, great rundown of the metrics. We're going to have more questions for you here at the Q&A at the end.I want to remind everybody, if you have questions, drop them down in the chat. We have a team in the back here grabbing those, we're and gonna dive into some q and a, of course, after Beth's, presentation coming up here. So, Andre, take a breather for a second. Beth, would love for you to take the chair now and go ahead and share what's your big idea for the year. Got you on. I think you might be on mute, Beth.BK: Yep. Got it. Hi. I'm Beth. I'm with Tech Insider Network. I wanted to take take a minute to introduce myself to anyone hearing from me for the first time. Through a series of strong AI calls, getting into AI early, my team has achieved a two hundred and ten percent five year cumulative that would place us as number two in the country if we were a hedge fund and number five if we were an ETF. Among those calls was in twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen when I stated NVIDIA would become the world's most valuable company that returned 40 x for our premium members. We had 45% allocation in AI going into 2023 by 01/01/2023. Today, we have a 98% allocation to AI.So for those of you who have followed me, it's probably no surprise that I plan to talk about AI today. But first, what I would love to talk about what I'll do is I'll first dispel if we are in an AI bubble. I think we need to address the elephant in the room, and then we will go into a a problem and just and I want to really fully describe this problem because if you don't understand the problem, it's really hard to see what the solution is going to be. And for me, I've always identified the problem first. If but on our paywall, I go into long deep dives around the problems that these tech companies are solving.Because if you solve a pain point, your demand curve is much steeper and a better trajectory than those who are just solving conveniences. But let's start with the AI bubble. Are we in an AI bubble? There are a few questions, whether it's AI or another area of tech or even another sector or whatever it might be, to ask when the word bubble is being thrown around. One of them is who is investing in the trend?In the dotcom, it was a lot of venture capitalists. It was a lot of IPOs, a lot of pre-revenue. In AI, it's the world's most cash efficient companies, the most profitable companies in the world. Very different. That contrast could not be starker.Who's making the money? Again, let's go back to the these bubbles. A lot of dotcom companies were pre revenue, or they only had $10 million to $20 million in revenue. What you may hear is that AI is not monetizing. That is not true. That is factually inaccurate. Meta has its ad engine called Advantage Plus. It is now on a 60 billion annual run rate within two to three years. That is faster than social media and faster than mobile in terms of contribution to Meta's revenue. They have seen the fastest run rate in their history from AI.OpenAI is another example of a company in the private markets that is now at a 20 billion annual run rate. That is the fastest we have ever seen in the tech industry. Azure, 50% from AI. We are and here's the interesting part, and that's not the topic of this conversation, but we are only in the training phase. We are going to go into the monetization phase soon, and we're already seeing really strong signals of how this technology will monetize.What this presentation will focus on is the third part of whether or not a trend is in a bubble or quite the opposite. Is it trend investable, which really is those supply constraints? The one thing about the.com that really does characterize a bubble is the oversupply. There were lots of ecommerce sites, more Internet sites, websites than you could than you could imagine or need or want. It was an oversupply, very low barriers to entry, quite the opposite with AI.This is extremely supply constrained, whether it's compute, memory, networking, advanced packaging, all of the above is supply constrained. That is the number one way I would know as a tech analyst for 15 years if something is in a bubble or not. Now of those that I just described, which is really the AI stack, I'm actually going to go in a different direction with you today, and I'm going to talk about a constraint that is so large and so bottlenecked that I can guarantee it did not exist during the PC era. It did not exist in the mobile area era. It did not exist in the Internet era. And that trend is AI energy.Now energy has been around for decades, maybe even a century, But it's really the importance of energy that is shifting, and that is what AI energy represents. I'm not talking your boring old energy sector here. And we have NVIDIA to thank for that transformative moment for AI energy. The clock is really ticking primarily because of how NVIDIA is releasing its GPUs.Right now, these systems are around one twenty kilowatts to one forty kilowatts. Within the next one to two years, we will be hitting 600 kilowatts. Let's go back to historically. Historically, NVIDIA has was shipping under 10 kilowatt systems, and so we're rapidly growing the power requirements of these rack scale systems. And the clock is ticking because as you can see on the far right, there's a very large bar there in terms of power consumption, and it really does hit right around the time that Rubin Ultra arrives.So, ultimately, NVIDIA is changing the game to where AI is no longer compute constrained. Instead, the AI race is a is a power race. It doesn't matter how much you spend on big tech CapEx. It doesn't matter how many AI systems you can now acquire because those supply constraints have eased. What matters is can you power those up?Therefore, I believe big tech in the next one to three years will do everything in its power to secure everything it possibly can to secure that power. And the key part of that is that big tech will need to do it quickly. If we look at global AI data center power demand, their estimates are everywhere, kind of all over the place right now. This is extremely conservative estimate from Boston Consulting Group. They're estimating 55% growth over the next three years.The United States has seen 0% growth. We have had flat energy consumption for 20 years. The global demand is supposed to grow by, has grown 80% over the last 20 years. However, what's really interesting about this problem is that it will be undeniably led by The United States. The amount of energy that we need has to be in The United States because we are the AI leader.Now if you break down the 55% growth rate and you drill in deeper, it's kind of tiny letters down there. It's in green and yellow. We're going to get into 100% plus CAGR on energy for inference. We will remain at a 30% CAGR for training. Again, I'm just going to go back to 30% energy growth on training, over 100% growth on inference from a country that did not grow energy consumption for the last 20 years.So how are we going to do that? Well, the electrical grid is one thing that often comes to mind. The problem is that the electrical grid is very stretched. This is the PJM auction pricing. It surged 11x for the for the next two years.The 2025, 2026 auction, pricing skyrocketed over 800%. The 2026, 2027 auction saw another 22% increase. The realized peak load for the electrical grid is hitting a 160 gigawatts two years earlier than originally forecast. Even if the grid was not this stretched, it would still take three to seven years because of transmission and interconnection queues. So even without the surging pricing and even without the fact that we're hitting peak loads, it would still take a long time because big tech data centers are not located in dense urban areas.So that transmission is a lengthy process. Another thing to keep in mind when you look at the grid versus when we talk about AI energy, why the grid is not really the best fit, is that data centers need to onboard hundreds of megawatts all at once. That's not what the grid was designed for. The grid was designed for a gradual load that came from residential, commercial, a very gradual process, not hundreds of megawatts, even gigawatts. We're building gigawatt factories right now, you know, thrown under the grid all at once.That’s not what the grid is designed for. So even without this pricing search, it's not clear that the grid would be the best path forward. Nuclear is often talked about. Nuclear is problematic because of the long lead time. Now, certainly, the quantity of power can be addressed by nuclear. No doubt. However, nuclear projects are discussed in decades. And even small modulator reactors, caught a bid over the last year or two, those are still five years out. And so this capital intensive option may be great longer-term for The United States strategically, but it doesn't really fit an investor profile. The ROI takes a long time.It's extremely capital intensive, and projects tend to be you know, projects tend to go over budget and are delivered late on top of the fact that it's already a very long timeline. Now I want to pause and before I go into my stock pick and just remember, Rubin Ultra is coming in the next one to two years. So what are we going to do? Electrical grid is not an option, and nuclear is not an option. So my 2026 pick is Bloom Energy.What Bloom Energy does is they provide solid oxide fuel cells. These are behind the meter. They are on-site. They can provide power in a few months, and they are significantly faster than the grid or nuclear. So when we talk about behind the meter, this refers to data centers connecting directly to the power source and bypassing the retail grid.This is a significant time advantage. It also can reduce exposure to power outages. Bloom Energy has a great value proposition around being the backup power should there be a power outage. Even that alone is an immense market for Bloom Energy, let alone the fact that they can also provide primary power. Another great part is that you're no longer you can buy this power direct, which from what I just showed you from the PJM auction, who would want to deal with that price increase?They also offer on-site power. Now what on-site power is referring to is power right there at the data center on the facility grounds. That is much quicker because you're no longer dealing with grid connections and transmission upgrades. So that piece is also solved through Bloom Energy. Lastly, The United States is the largest producer of natural gas.They will not struggle to access natural gas. We have plentiful supplies, plentiful pipeline. But the number one way across all of this presentation so far that Bloom Energy is different is time to power. So there's no interconnection queues. They can do in three months what it would take years for, like, the electrical grid and nuclear.In fact, they typically quote 90 days, and they just broke their own record by supplying power to Oracle within 55 days. When I talk about AI energy, it's not enough to say we need more power. Because if you were to say we need more energy and keep it very simple, then, of course, electrical grid or nuclear could be that option. That's not the problem that I'm presenting. I'm presenting the fact that we need more energy urgently.It really is that keyword urgently. There are very few companies that can do that. Bloom Energy has been around for a long time. Bloom Energy has been around for a couple decades. And during that time, they've really greatly increased their price to performance.Every once in a while, you know, management teams, they have these great quotes. And to quote Bloom Energy CEO, he stated that when discussing price performance improvements, he stated, for over a decade, our fuel cells have seen double digit year over year cost reduction. While our costs are coming down, our performance going up is going up, our fuel cells last longer, are more reliable, and are more efficient, and today produce 10x more power in the same footprint than they did ten years ago. As a growth investor, I like anything that has the word 10x in it. Also, just drilling into the CEO using the word footprint here, data centers are becoming very dense.He's making a nod toward yet another piece to Bloom Energy, which is that these modular solid oxide fuel cells work great in dense, in these highly dense data centers that are with density only increasing, which means they're just trying to pack in more and as little of a footprint as possible, and that's another area that Bloom Energy has a natural fit for. So, of course, as a you know, our company, we do over a 100 checklist on every earnings report. We do not believe you should speculate on tech companies. If a company is solving a problem, it should be very visible in the growth rate. If we look at Bloom Energy, we can see a noticeable acceleration.At one point, we were in the, you know, low 10%, 11%. They're accelerating into 2027 with 71%, basically, 71%, 72% revenue growth. From this past quarter, these estimates are up 16 to 20 points. I still believe these estimates are too low. However, great to know they're accelerating in revenue.A company should be accelerating in revenue if it's solving a massive problem where hundreds of billions are pouring into, you know, building these data centers. Obviously, the majority of that is compute, but the second highest spend is going to become energy, second to compute. And if you're solving that problem, we should see an acceleration, and we are. And even better, we're starting to see EPS growth outpace revenue growth, and that does go back to that price to performance quote where costs are decreasing, and you can see that in this exceptional earnings growth of a 100% expected over the next three years. Energy companies are not going to be the same profile as a software company, however.You know, it takes cash to build these systems. So cash is a slight blemish for Bloom Energy. Their cash to debt ratio is 50.53. They make $0.53 for every dollar of debt. They have $0.53 in cash for every dollar of debt.And their free cash flow can be very lumpy. In the next slide, you'll see some workarounds to that. And, also, I always like to touch base on valuation because that is where a lot of the bubble discussion is centered. Aren't these companies overvalued? Earlier in the presentation, I had presented that The United States has had 0% growth in energy consumption over the past twenty years, so a flat market.That's where Bloom was participating, was a 0% growth market. Now as stated, they're moving into a growth market where if it's GenAI and training, driving the energy consumption that's needed, and Bloom is those are Bloom's customers, it's suddenly in a 100% plus CAGR market if we're talking inference here. If we're just talking training, it's still moving into a 30% CAGR market. That deserves a higher valuation. They're now in a hypergrowth market, and before, they were in a flat market.So the company had valuation hasn't been rerated. We prefer to use technicals in order to we prefer to use technicals because at sometimes, winners have high valuations, and they sustain those valuations for many years. We don't want to miss out on that, and we also don't want to make sure we're buying high, which is something that my firm dedicates ourselves to. We drill very, very closely into the technicals around each of our positions to make sure that we're navigating the market with a risk management overlay. And that's how we view valuation.We use a technical analysis overlay to really surf tech and really get in low, write it high, maybe trim at the top, and I'll show you how we handled Bloom last year. My last point on Bloom Energy is their customer list is growing. This they've been adding really great qualifiers such as Oracle, CoreWeave, Equinix on the AI, Neocloud, AI data center side, utilities like AEP, and they have a new capital partner in Brookfield who is moving in with 5 billion that will now bring Bloom Energy to the gigawatt level. Bloom Energy has really been in the megawatt level. And with a capital partner like Brookfield, they can now move into the gigawatt level in terms of how, you know, enter how much they're supplying to these data centers.Last year, Bloom was one of our biggest winners. Although the actual stock was up 291% due to buying low and trimming at key levels, we were able to see a return of 376% for our portfolio. With that said, I believe that winners keep winning. Energy is becoming mission critical in 2026 to 2028. For the most part, even those 120 kilowatt systems from NVIDIA were not shipping last year.It took them a few months into a couple quarters before they were shipping in volume. It was really Q3 before NVIDIA was shipping in volume the 120 kilowatt system. They just now started shipping in volume the 140 kilowatt system. So Bloom was a winner before those systems were shipping because power does precede those systems arriving. Otherwise, GPUs would sit idle.What I'm getting at is, come 2026, especially those 300 kilowatt, 600 kilowatt systems, the power is going to have to proceed those systems shipping. I believe that Bloom's best years are in front and that the story has only strengthened as we move into the next couple of years. Although Bloom was one of our biggest winners, we've had many more winners behind the paywall, especially AI related. What my team offers is real time trade alerts, weekly webinars. We are prolific in our research.We produce, I'm going to go out on a limb and say the most research of any firm I'm aware of. We probably we are in the range of over a 150 pieces of analysis every year. To on that note, this week, I am going to release a top 15 quarterly report on AI stocks, so my top 15 AI stocks. That report is 49 pages long. It's 20,000 words. That beats my last quarterly report from Q4. It beats my last quarterly report from Q3 in terms of depth of research. And Bloom is one of those 15 stocks, but there are, of course, 14 more. And we also do webinars on a weekly basis every Thursday at 02:30 eastern. So I'm sure Daniel will pitch this as well, but we do have a 20% limited time offer.So if you want to check us out, sign up today. Thank you.DS: Yes. Holy cow. Talk about growth. Great session. Beth, thank you so much for taking the time to put the presentation together. Everyone, of course, as Beth mentioned, go check out Tech Insider Network. Also, check out the Data Driven Investor if you haven't already. I'm asked the team in the back to drop that in the chat. And if you're watching the replay, you can find those links beneath this video. Now, Andre, I want to come back over to you for a second.So hearing, obviously, you know, MercadoLibre's in the AI space a little bit as you were talking about in your presentation, what are your thoughts about Bloom Energy?AC: Oh, I have to say, thank god that I published my bullish article on Bloom two months ago. Because if not, people would be saying, I'm just saying this to be nice to Beth. But I like Bloom very much. I think it's an amazing company. I mean, like Beth said, it's providing a solution to a much needed problem, an urgent problem.And it's a volatile stock, so investors should always make sure that they understand that each specific stock is right for their own needs, restorative, and so forth. But I think it's an explosive company. I like it really quite much. I think I have a bullish article that I published in Seeking Alpha. It's an analyst speak, in November. So, yeah, I don't really have anything more to say because Beth did a much better job in explaining the bullish status than I could never do.DS: Yes. She definitely did. And, obviously, I saw people in the chat here saying, Mike Draw, best the greatest. So you definitely have your fans here, and they love the presentation, Beth. Wanted to jump over to you, though, and ask MercadoLibre. I mean, obviously, Latin America, are you following that kind of space? It's similar to Amazon. Right? So it's like people make that comparison. Do you have any thoughts on MercadoLibre?BK: Yeah. Thanks for the presentation, Andre. I followed your work. You've done a great job. And MercadoLibre, it does go back to that bubble slide for me, which was who is making the money.And I think everyone's waiting for the next great AI app. But in reality, most of these bigger companies are using AI to improve, you know, their internal workloads. So it's our you know, Beta's using it for their AI ad system, their AI automation for ads. Microsoft's using it on Azure and really pumping up their Azure offerings. Google Cloud, Google with Google Cloud search.And so, MercadoLibre does have, you know you know, a huge a huge customer base that if they can apply AI and improve their sales, improve their profits, that is, in my opinion, the software trade for the next few years is the established players improving internally their workloads and their systems and their software and then driving a new trajectory in revenue and inflection in revenue and an inflection in profits.DS: What a time to be alive. Right? This is an incredible time for us all to be here watching these companies transform. I mean, AI, I've already been using it. It's amazing.It's transformed my life and how I work even here at Seeking Alpha. I want to dive into some Q&A, though. We've got a lot of great questions that have been coming into the chat, so I'm going to bounce back and forth between the two of you here. I'd like to start off, though, Andre, MercadoLibre. What do you consider is the biggest risk for your thesis playing out?AC: Well, everybody talks always about competitive risk, which is relevant. For example, has a strong competition from Amazon in Mexico, also in Brazil. And in the fintech business, new holdings is a strong company, which I like very much, which we love to gain some market share in Brazil. Well, a it's leader in Brazil, and it's gaining market share in Colombia and Mexico. However, like I said before, MercadoLibre has unsurmountable competitive advantages.For example, in many Latin American countries, you use Mercado Pago every day. You buy from the e-commerce platform almost every week, probably every week. And maybe once or twice per month, you buy via Amazon something that gets delivered from The US. It takes longer. It's a product that you cannot find in your country.So, there's room for both. I think investors are always too simplistic, and they like to think, okay. This company or this company but what for example, if I had said, okay. You are in the late seventies or early eighties, and you're looking at Coca Cola and PepsiCo, and you say, well, which one should I buy? Well, both.Both is excellent doing well. What about, I don't know, Visa and Mastercard? Well, both. I don't know. Lots of examples of when you have lots of room for growth and you have strong companies with solid competitive advantages, that is always both.I think MercadoLibre will be the leader in Latin America. No one is going to replace the company, and it's going to gain market share versus brick and mortar retailers and versus the incumbent bank and also versus cash. The company is gaining a lot of land versus cash. It is also displacing the traditional banks, but the main competitor right now is cash, and MercadoLibre is fast superior in that regard. So I'm not worried really about competition.It's good to have a competition. The company has always had competition, and this is why Mercury has built multiple layers of moat around the business.DS: Now, Beth, you did a great job laying out the multiyear future horizon here for Bloom Energy. But same question. If you had to say this is the risk that I'm focused on, you and your team over there, now your 49 pagers or all 20,000 words, all the things that you're talking about. If you had to say there's a risk, what is the risk for the Bloom Energy trade?BK: I would say it's the energy sector as a whole. It is carries higher volatility than the software, you know, even some of the AI semiconductors, which have led, you know, quite significantly over the past few years. If you look at the semiconductor basket versus the queues, the semiconductors were two x the queues last year. There's easier stocks is what I'm saying in AI for sure because of the sheer volatility that energy sees. It has a higher beta profile just because it's an energy stock.And that piece means it's for those who do give a little bit of extra attention to risk management or those who are absolutely able to hold through the ups and downs. I'd say I'm a little bit of both, and therefore, something like Bloom, because of that outsized opportunity, would increase my confidence to hold during a drawdown. However, of this of the of the, I make buckets. So, we have, like, AI networking bucket. We have an AI accelerator bucket. We have a software bucket. We have an energy bucket. Of all those buckets in AI, energy is the most carries the most volatility.DS: Well said. Andre, jumping back over to you. So, you are the data driven investor as we have said here today, and we have a lot of people that are seeking Alpha Power users, and they and they like the quant system and all the metrics that are offered there. So they noticed that MercadoLibre had been a hold rating for the last eight months. Where do you like to derive your data from? Do you strictly go to the balance sheet, income statement, and cash flow?AC: Well, it depends. I do have a lot of quantitative models that I use in my service. I love quant investing. But when I do quant, I do quant. You know? I try not to mix things. So in those portfolios, like, one of those portfolios has gained, like, 500% since 2020. Lots of these portfolios currently own gold and metals and things which are different from tech and AI stocks. And these are based on similar principles to the ones that the Seeking Alpha Quant system uses. It considers value.It considers fundamental quality. It considers the trends in our provisions. I would say my models are perhaps more aggressive. They also short. They hit their portfolio when there's more volatility.They trade weekly, so those are very dynamic portfolios. I like this approach very much, but sometimes when I want to build a long-term thesis for a company, I think that you have to see things that are beyond the short-term numbers. You need to look at the quality of the business. Like I said, the competitive mode, it's sometimes not reflected on a number in a specific quarter. Because, for example, you say, okay. I want more business should have strong margins. Yeah. True. But if you look just at the numbers, you can say, oh, merchants are contracting. This business is using its most.Well, it's not the case. The company is building more moat. This is why the margins are contracting. So when I do this long term investments such as MercadoLibre, I like to look at the quality, things that are not in the numbers. Then I do a lot of, you know, quantitative investing. It is 100% numbers. I do not mess with that. In fact, just late yesterday, published an alert for some of my subscribers. I said, okay.We have obtained massive gains in our Metas portfolio. Go into your mind. Be careful with this because Metas are extended, which is something I have never done. I did just once because are very extended. I tried not to provide too much discretionary commentary on my quant portfolio. But when I do discretionary investing such as MercadoLibre, I look at things that are beyond the numbers. I look at the numbers, of course, but then I look at the modes, the quality of the management team, and things that are not usually reflected on quant numbers.DS: Alright. Beth, I'm going to come back over to you. So, obviously, it was brought up this year is a midterm election year, and it seems like some people are worried. Is there any worry there about, you know, if we lose the house or the senate for the republicans and it becomes a split? Are democrats behind the AI trade? Or is there any worry about the upcoming election cycle and how it might affect AI?BK: I think it's a bipartisan issue at this point. Our biggest the biggest threat so let me just back up.

We The United States has the best design companies. Right? We have NVIDIA, AMD, Broadcom, TSMs coming onto our soil. We have the best software companies, whether it's big tech. You know, we have these things, the Mag 7, or the entrepreneurial culture that is bottoms up. We have these great startups all over the country, a lot a lot of them on the East Coast and West Coast, but everywhere, really. And when it comes to innovation, The United States leads.However, with AI, The United States has its work cut out for we have our work cut out for us. China is on our heels, and China has a lot of energy. Remember the bottleneck that I presented is energy, which means we're going to get to a point where this compute constraint, which has been NVIDIA's systems, there's only so many to go around, is really no longer the problem. The problem is the power, and China doesn't have that problem like we do. They run at an 80% surplus off the top of my head compared to us at a 15%. Well, AI can gobble up that surplus very quickly.I think it's a bipartisan issue. I don't have any doubt that, overall, Washington is not where the roadblock will be. The roadblock will instead be in this innovation cycle, and finding those winners is more important to me.DS: Alright. You heard it from her first. Andre, you obviously are focusing here on Argentina, Latin America, as well as many more. But today, specifically around MercadoLibre, there was a question that came in that was wondering if you incorporated any risk premium additional risk premium for focusing on this pick in your models.AC: I'm sorry. Do you mean for the quant models or for MercadoLibre in particular?DS: Let's go with both. Do you factor it into your quant models and then specifically for MercadoLibre?AC: Well, my quant models, they are mostly short term, so I don't really need to do this cash flows valuation for these companies because, you know, the most they follow price trends, so they are momentum driven. I don't need to worry too much about the long term discount rates and those barriers because those are mostly trading models, not so much long term investment models. For, I think that you need to absolutely consider the additional economic risk in Latin America. But there is something I have learned by following the company. I have followed MercadoLibre since forever, since he's become a public business.When – and I live in Argentina, so I have seen all kind of even banking runs, all prices, recessions, went off. When a crisis comes, the company generally emerges stronger than before because the smaller, the weaker competition tends to disappear. You know? In the credit business okay. Let's assume something bad happens. I know. A currency crisis in some country.There's a good chance that MercadoLibre because it has shortened credit and it has a lot of data to adapt its credit exposure. It's going to do much better than the smaller companies. And when the economy recovers, then the smaller companies, they will be unable to continue growing, but MercadoLibre will be in a much stronger position.The same happens in ecommerce. When a recession comes, for example, in these in these countries, people get more price conscious. Look for bigger bag bargains. So instead of buying right now from another store, you go to MercadoLibre and you check the prices, and you get your groceries, for example. Right now, you can buy a lot of groceries in MercadoLibre at better prices.So the business model is quite resilient in terms of economic performance. On a quarterly basis, because the company makes money in reals and in pesos and in Latin American currencies, if there's some currency volatility, of course, that's going to affect the numbers in US dollars. But investors already know this, and they tend to look at business unit economics and numbers both in local currencies and in hard currencies. So at the end of the day, when you see that the fundamentals are evolving very well and that the company has been able to sell through all kinds of economic storms over the years.I have a lot of confidence that MercadoLibre will be able to sustain its performance regardless of food habits with the economy in different countries in Latin America.DS: Alright. Now, Beth, I wanted to come back and ask you excuse me. Somebody in the chat, I think, really resonated with the whole energy side of things and what's going on, but they asked you a general question of, is it time to, is it time to trim or buy energy stocks, which I realize is a very broad question in the form of the energy sector. So maybe we can narrow it down. I mean, people think of energy. They traditionally think of companies like ExxonMobil, right, Chevron, some of the big industry leaders that that are very well established even within the ETF of the XLE and things like that. Is this going to be an overall energy boom, or is it going to be more of that liquid natural gas side that you were also talking about?BK: I see an energy boom for anyone that can solve that problem, which is the gap we have between 2026 and 2028. I think it's a pretty mission critical gap. And NVIDIA, as you know, is the juggernaut, they are they are setting the pace. But also these r and d firms and what they want to accomplish next is setting a pace, which is that, really, we're going to, about H2, second half of this year, get into some of that mission critical squeeze in terms of really getting the appropriate amount of power to these data centers. I do think it's a boom.However, going back to the volatility of energy, and then if you saw our chart on Bloom and our buys last year, we really favor layering in. We're just a layering in type of type of team. We have a technical analyst as our portfolio manager for a reason, which is to assert to everyone that no matter how great of a tech stock you pick, timing does matter, especially in this sector because, you know, if you buy high, you're going to could take years to get returns. I don't think that's the case with AI. I don't think that's the case with strong AI players.I don't think that's the case with strong AI energy players either, but, certainly, you can improve your returns if you layer in, and that is our process, which means we buy at key levels that have been identified in advance. Those key levels and those discussions happen every single week for an hour with the portfolio manager on Thursdays at 04:30 eastern.DS: I want to stick with you for a second, though. So the energy play, is there any potential that these semiconductor chips that are being built that are consuming all of this energy become more efficient on their energy usage?BK: They will become more efficient. That's a separate point from the amount of energy that something like inference is going to require. I'm going to shock you probably, because we're not in the AI boom yet, people. We are not there. We are in the training phase, which means we're building these large language models.Once those large language models are embedded into applications and those applications, enterprise, consumer, all throughout the whole ecosystem start to get deployed at a lot of times at the edge, all of that, you're going to start to see power consumption skyrocket. Even though they are getting more efficient, you can think of the pie, the pie is just getting so much bigger still. So, even if the slice were to go down or, you know, that kind of thing per system were to go down, the pie is getting so much bigger and bigger and bigger. And the moment that happens is, for sure, NVIDIA's GPU road map, but it really is the arrival of inference, which, again, is running those AI models at the edge. It's going to require, you know, so many queries, so many API calls, so much usage measured in tokens, but so much usage that power, requirements are going to surge is my analysis, my data driven conclusion.DS: Data driven. Alright. Andre, back over to you. Wanted to ask you this question that came in. So you were talking about MercadoLibre kind of versus Amazon, but there was a question that came in about what about in you in the financial services side or Temu or Shopee? And what are the thoughts about competition outside of just Amazon for MercadoLibre?AC: Well, yeah, I think both Temu and Shopee I mean, Shopee, which is owned by Sea Limited, it has a presence in Brazil. It has been gaining market share, but they don't have the logistics. So, most consumers, they buy some cheap products maybe from Asia via Shopee, they're not going to be doing the grocery buying. They're not going to be buying books from their customer. They're not going to buy high quality clothes, a refrigerator, or the things that you typically buy on MercadoLibre.The same with. I mean, they are unbeatable in terms of low priced textile products, but that's a niche. I mean, this it's not really a game changer in terms of scale from the MercadoLibre. It doesn't have the logistics. It doesn't have the customer trust.Many people they buy from there, and then they say, oh, okay. What I received is not a high quality product. And it's cheap, but it's not high quality. It's not something that people are going to be using on a weekly basis. So, yes, there's competition, but has the moat to protect the business from the competition.It has the brand reputation. It has the logistics network, and it has the network effect. It has the best suppliers and the most customers. So the semi fintech I mean, new holdings, it's an excellent company, but it's the only, really, the only fintech in Latin America that they consider seriously, like, an important player, a competitor to MercadoLibre in the future, probably, not so much right now. There are many other fintechs, much smaller, much weaker with business models, which are unprofitable, and they don't they don't own the data.They don't own the tech stack. So, yeah, I mean, again, both and both new holdings are going to do very well. They're going to be getting market share from cash from traditional banks. I mean, it's a long runway for growth, and I'm not worried about competitions growing the business very much because, in fact, the company has always faced a lot of competition.DS: Well said. Alright, Beth. Wanna jump back over to you. Great question that I came through. It's we want to take this to the sky. Musk has made tons of fanfare and news about putting data centers in the sky and using solar energy to power these needs. I got to ask you first off, do you think that's possible? And then what are your thoughts on it?BK: That would go outside of my expertise, I would say. What I really look for is, you know, these problems that are being solved and then rooted with revenue growth and earnings growth. I know everyone has an opinion on Elon Musk. My opinion is very, again, data driven, which is that whether it's, you know, Tesla or SpaceX, I do not get behind the company until there's real revenue. And for example, how long have we heard Tesla's this great AI company, yet they don't have AI revenue yet?It's those kinds of things that I avoid. And so I would avoid, for my own discipline, some kind of data center, you know, in in the sky is I I powered by solar. For me, until it's built, it's generating revenue for me as an investor, I don't care about it, if that makes sense, because there's so many companies that are generating that revenue that need my full attention. And I will gladly go back and reassess Tesla, for example, once I start to see meaning you know, a a nice movement in the AI revenue. But until then, you know, it's not on my radar.DS: Avoiding the speculation. I think a lot of us can definitely connect with that. Andre, back to you. So people were asking, obviously, Argentina focused. There was a quick question that came in. I wanted to ask you about what are your thoughts about buying an ETF that just focused on Argentina overall, maybe getting some MercadoLibre within the ETF wrapper?AC: Well, that will probably work. But I think if you're going to because the ETF, there's only one ETF that has a large position in MercadoLibre and also has other Argentinian companies. I think if we're going to do that, I would probably pick MercadoLibre and also maybe some because I would like to pick my best sectors in Argentina. So that will be perhaps by MercadoLibre and by, in addition to this, some energy companies in Argentina, for example, which I think is a promising problem in the sector in the country. It has a lot of shale oil and so forth.There are lots of opportunities in energy. So, I think our portfolio that you can build yourself, including and energy companies in Argentina, is better in my opinion than buying DGF, which has a lot of MercadoLibre. And then some financials and lots of companies in Argentina, which are not as attractive as energy stock in the country in my opinion.DS: Alright. Now, Beth, back over to you. There was a question that came in about, could you maybe list some of the Bloom Energy competition and how they stack up against Bloom Energy?BK: Bloom Energy's competition is mainly outside of the solid oxide fuel cells, and it's more things like gas turbines, just any form of energy that you can think of. Gas turbines, my understanding is can move fairly quickly too. There's others where a nice workaround that big tech has been doing is to retrofit Bitcoin mining operations. That has the added benefit of not being a greenfield construction project, but instead be called what they call, like, a brownfield, which means a lot of the construction is already done, and that's an added benefit on top of the fact that they have power to the site and on top of the fact they've already contracted that power. So those prices are typically already in place.They're not as subject to, you know, this pricing surge that just happened. So bit know, Bitcoin miners come up quite a bit when we're looking at that 2026, 2028 bridging the gap trying to bridge that gap. But then others outside of that, it'd be gas turbines, things of that nature. I believe GEV and others have, you know, very creative solutions, so keep an eye on that. Something called aeroderivatives.Meaning, you've got these old sleepy legacy companies, and they're being presented a problem. And they can you know, we're seeing some movement in terms of how that problem is approached. Can you know, are there more creative ways to do it, like the aeroderivatives from the natural gas behemoth to GEV? That's one example. However, you know, it really, again, goes back to the next two to three years, and those are the ones that I've that I've seen that can fill that gap. But outside of that, there are others that are constantly trying to solve that problem.It's lucrative enough, urgent enough that it's all hands on deck, and I think there'll be a lot of, again, innovation coming out of the space over the next year or two. I don't think it's a static competitive environment by any means.DS: Alright. Andre, I want to dive a little bit deeper into MELI with you for a second, specifically because we're talking about AI, and we're talking about MercadoLibre, and they have the logistic arm and how they're starting to implement AI. And as Beth has mentioned, you know, The U.S. has all of these great this great AI infrastructure, these models and everything else that we're outsourcing to the other countries around the world. Obviously, Latin America is starting to gobble it up. So do you have any information on MercadoLibre potentially? Which models do they use? How are they implementing AI beyond just, you know, streamlining efficiency and the logistics? Any insights there?AC: I don't have anything in particular, but I could tell you this. The founder and CEO, Marcos Oberlin, he led the company since forever. And last year, he said he decided to take a step aside from the day to day CEO responsibilities in order to put a strategic focus on AI. I think that a big part of what the company is doing is just being quiet about it.Bad boys, they're moving sellers. I think that we're going to see some big announcements in this area, but I don't have any specific information about what they are doing. And I think this is pretty much intentional.DS: Alright. Beth, coming back to you about Bloom. There was a question about do they buy batteries or their fuel cells, or do they make their own internally?BK: The battery side, yeah, I'm not actually sure they rely on batteries. I believe one of their better value propositions is that they don't have to rely on batteries as much. And, yeah, I'd have to look into that more.AC: Okay.DS: Yeah. It's fair enough. Well, then let's follow-up with this one. They would like your insights about the memory market. Obviously, we've seen what's going on with SanDisk and Micron and that side of the AI world right now. Would you mind taking a moment just to maybe share a high level view of what you think about the memory?BK: Yeah. Wow. I said it a couple months ago. With the way Micron's margins were expanding, this is not the Micron we know. If you look at Micron's fundamental profile, again, the data should support the trend. Right? Micron has shifted into this fairly high margin semiconductor company. If it's happened in Micron's history, it hasn't happened, like I said, since I've been a tech analyst for 15 years. My this is this is a new era for Micron, and it really is from DRAM pricing surging, specifically within a lot of these AI systems now.Again, memory is really preceding the boom, and it really is becoming also important as we move into inference. What you'll find is that these AI systems you know, NVIDIA's obviously been this near monopoly. They now have more competitors with AMD. If you look at the next systems coming out, whether that's the Helios system from AMD or Vera Rubin from NVIDIA, it's not a big compute change for NVIDIA. It's a lot of change around memory and then bandwidth and how to get these systems to all talk very quickly together, all these components.He calls it extreme codesign against six different components, and it really is this memory and bandwidth problem that is leading the architectural changes for the next iteration of AI systems, which what that means is you could argue is Micron more supply constrained and more important than NVIDIA. If NVIDIA systems are all design are becoming designed around this increase in memory, is NVIDIA now suddenly dependent on, you know, SK Hynix, Micron, Samsung, those kinds of players? That would again mark that shift that we like we like to invest in.DS: Yeah. Focusing on the problems. Right? Alright. Andre, back to you. So you mentioned in your presentation MercadoLibre is doing a lot of investment trying to capture market share and grow. Obviously, they're taking a little bit of losses in the near term, but when do you expect that to pay out? Is it i a year from now? Is it a two or three year story? What are you thinking?AC: Well, they're not taking losses. They are reducing their profits. They're still profitable, making a lot of money, but the those margins are contracting. Now management does not provide the guidance. I think that it's one of I mean, Wall Street loves to see guidance about what's going to happen with management with margins, but the company likes to focus on the long term and, you know, detach itself from those short term pressures to deliver specific number.Now I don't think it's going to be a severe contraction in profit margins, and I don't think it's going to be longer than this year. Because, I mean, this company has gone through this kind of processes in the past. For example, until 2016, 2017, but it was mostly an e-commerce platform with no fintech, with no logistics where buyers were it was matching buyers and sellers, making a profit on every transaction. Huge profit margins above 30%, and almost in profit double, slowing the moderately a moderate growth rate. Then in the management team, they see okay.Decided, okay. We need to accelerate growth. We need to build a stronger business. They started to build the logistics network. They started to build the fintech segment, and it went from 30% operating margins to negative numbers.I mean, the company was losing money, and Wall Street was always anxious about that. If you look at the numbers now, it's making 10x more revenue, and it's widely profitable. But that was a huge investment phase in which they had to win the logistics. They had to win the fintech. Right now, they are only just offering cheaper logistics.So, it's not like they are in any way compromising their margins. They never say they didn't provide guidance, but they have said that they want to keep margins in the current range and play with different growth opportunities. So, I think that it is not going to be more than this year in which we see some contraction in margins because you have to think about it. The expansion in the great portfolio was huge. It's 83%. I don't think they're going to continue expanding at this rate in the following quarters. Right? They saw the opportunity, determine it's right, the economic macro, whatever it's are. I'm sorry. They see the business working, so they made a a big acceleration.It's not going to be like that in every quarter. And the government is gaining efficiencies. So I would expect margins in 2027 to be higher than 2026. About the next few quarters, I'm not sure really.DS: Quick follow-up with you, though. So the management team that's in place there and the board, are they is this a company that's focused on share buybacks as well?AC: No. They have not – they have never made a split. I think that the founder once, you know, was asked about this, and he came back with a quote from Warren Buffett who said, you know, splits are just something that the market short term traders like, but they don't they don't change anything for their for shareholders. And now, because the price is quite elevated at 2,000 and something, it's kind of uncomfortable for option traders. So maybe it would make sense to do a split.And share buybacks, I think that at this point in time in time, they have a lot of room for growth, and they are not going to be buying stock until they have consistent excess cash flows. And they decide that repurchasing the stock is a better use of capital than growing the business in create growing the business in logistics. At this point, I would bet that for the next two or three years, we're not going to see any mature buybacks from MercadoLibre.DS: Alright. Now we've only got a few more minutes left here. Again, everyone, we've dove-in to so much information here today, a lot more than I was even expecting. This is awesome. I highly encourage you. Go check out Tech Insider Network if you want more of Beth Kandick's research and her entire team, as well as the Data Driven Investor. If you want to reach out to Andrés Cardenal as well and get all of his research, his quant models, everything we've been talking about here today, highly encourage you to do that. Beth, coming back to you real fast, because you talked about nuclear in your presentation. There was a question that came in, how does the cost of electricity produced by Bloom Energy compare to that of nuclear energy? Because I know you had mentioned nuclear is a few years out, and Bloom's the way to get energy now to get us there. What about the cost of what goes into each one?BK: Yeah. Sure. I actually got the note too. Bloom does not use batteries typically, so it's not really a battery driven technology, which is what I'd said. I just want to make sure I fact checked it. And then, also, it's almost irrelevant what the price is between nuclear and bloom because nuclear is so far out. It's not even an option right now, again, for that 2026 to 2028 time frame. Now what you could ask is, you know, something like is tapping into the electrical grid, and how does that compare? My understanding from hearing the management team is that they offer the best price to performance. They did touch base on how they've reduced costs while 10x-ing performance for investors, but it really is that 10x-ing performance for the hyperscalers.They've gone in to basically say that if you look at the total cost, Bloom is cheaper for the same amount of tokens as another as another energy resource. So they've basically been quite clear that they're the most competitive in pricing when you look at the full value chain.DS: Alright. Quick follow-up with you as well, actually. The China side of things, we haven't dove too much into. I mean, obviously, DeepSeek rattled the world last January. Everybody still has eyes on it. Seems like they are heavily not only into AI, but also Quantum Computing. There's that talk as well. Is there a risk, a serious risk from their side of exporting their AI to the world, or do you feel like it's more just that America focus? It's a loaded question, isn't it?AC: I'm sorry. Are you talking to me?DS: No. I was asking Beth. Okay.BK: Oh, I'm sorry. I thought you were asking Andre.DS: No. No. I was asking you about the China side of the AI trade. Is there an actual worry there for the Chinese models to you know, maybe they are more energy efficient. Maybe the open source side of things and all of that of having their models go to the rest of the world over the America based model and infrastructure.BK: Okay. Sorry about that. I was thinking you're going back to Andre. China's, there's some the word is sovereign AI where each country is going to want to onshore their own AI their own AI software, large language models, data centers as much as possible. We were in this world where, like, everything was, you know, being shared.Like, you know, no matter where you were in the world, you're you might have been using, you know, hyper United States hyperscalers. We're likely moving more on prem for a sovereign AI, which means each country which means each country is going to have its own AI strategy. There's not going to be a lot of interdependence because it's seen as a matter of defense. That's very different than Internet, mobile, those kinds of things where you know, if India is going to use a lot of our applications, maybe heavy Facebook users, things like that, it wasn't really a problem to, you know, that country or any other country, but that is going to be a problem if it's AI. So, every country is going to try to really onshore their AI strategy as much as possible, but especially China.So China's going to be China, and The United States is going to be The United States. We're going to try to get as many countries to use our AI our AI software, LLMs, you know, infrastructure as possible. There will be pushback. They'll make them on prem, like Saudi Arabia, that kind of stuff. We'll try to build out their own data centers. And I think that that's the better way to look at it is that there used to be like, is it know, who's going to take over the world? China or The United States? And it's that each country is going to really try to build up their own AI strategy and not be so dependent, you know, on The United States or China. And that includes us versus China. I don't I don't see it as that important as some of the other issues that I've mentioned.DS: Alright. Thanks for the insights there, Beth. Now, everybody, unfortunately, we are at the top of the hour. Time has flown by. I hope it feels the same way for you. Andrés Cardenal, Beth Kindig, can't thank you both enough. You really are the top shelf analysts here. Thank you so much for taking the time to put these presentations together and share your big ideas for 2026. Everyone, again, as I mentioned earlier, go follow them on Seeking Alpha. You can follow their author profile.You can dive into their investing groups, Tech Insider Network and The Data Driven Investor. And if you haven't already, feel free to subscribe to Investing Experts on every podcast platform, whichever one you choose. And as always, I love seeing you all here and interacting with the chat. So, thank you for taking the time to do that as well. And that's going to wrap it up for Investing Experts Live Top Ideas for 2026. And if you're watching the replay, thank you as well. We'll see you here in a future video. Take care.Join The Data Driven Investor Today!Follow Andrés Cardenal on Seeking Alpha!Join Tech Insider Network Today!Follow Beth Kindig on Seeking Alpha!