MercadoLibre & The Long Game

Pictet North America Advisors, they bought some MercadoLibre. Twenty-seven hundred shares, to be exact. About $5.68 million worth, give or take. It happened in the fourth quarter. So it goes.

A Little Digging

The filing says Pictet increased their holdings. Now they have 9,342 shares. The value went up by $3.30 million. Shares and money. They always seem to go together, don’t they? Like loneliness and late-night television. The transaction value, calculated using the average share price over the fourth quarter, was $5.68 million.

Where It Stands

MercadoLibre now represents 1.79% of Pictet’s U.S. equity portfolio. A small piece of a very large pie. But a piece nonetheless.

Here’s what else they own, as of December 31st:

  • NYSE:BUR: $68.51 million
  • NYSEMKT:GLD: $60.85 million
  • NYSE:TSM: $55.33 million
  • NASDAQ:GOOGL: $53.20 million
  • NASDAQ:MSFT: $40.45 million

As of January 15th, MercadoLibre shares were trading at $2,098.85. Up 14.2% over the past year. Though, it underperformed the S&P 500 by a couple of percentage points. Numbers. They’re just…numbers.

The Outfit

MercadoLibre, they do a lot of things. E-commerce, fintech, logistics, advertising. All across Latin America. They connect buyers and sellers. They move money around. It’s a whole system. A complicated system. Like the human body, really.

Here’s a little table, just for the record:

Metric Value
Price (as of 2026-01-15) $2,098.85
Market Capitalization $106.31 billion
Revenue (TTM) $26.19 billion
Net Income (TTM) $2.08 billion

What It Means, If Anything

Scale. That’s the signal. In a market that’s still figuring things out, size matters. Latin American e-commerce and digital payments are still, shall we say, under-developed. But MercadoLibre is already operating at a significant scale. $7.4 billion in quarterly revenue. Up 39% year over year. So it goes.

They’re moving a lot of money around. $71.2 billion in total payment volume last quarter. 72 million fintech monthly active users. And they’re lending money – $11 billion in credit portfolios – without things falling apart. That’s good. They’re building something that works. Like a very complicated ant colony.

They’re alongside the usual suspects – gold, big tech companies. That suggests a belief in long-term growth, not just a quick profit. They’re building a future. Or at least, they’re trying to. It’s a noble effort, in a meaningless universe.

MercadoLibre might have underperformed the U.S. market last year. But platforms that control commerce, payments, logistics, and credit rarely give up their market share. Not once they reach a certain size. They just keep growing. It’s the way of things. So it goes.

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2026-01-17 07:13