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MercadoLibre, if you’re not familiar, is essentially the Amazon of Latin America. Which is quite a feat, when you consider the… shall we say, complexities of doing business across a continent as diverse as South America. They’ve been at it for over two decades, building a sprawling ecosystem of e-commerce and financial services. And they’ve been remarkably successful. For seven years running, they’ve posted revenue growth of at least 37%. That’s not incremental improvement, that’s a rocket launch. Last quarter saw a 45% jump in revenue, which, frankly, is rather astonishing.

It is, after all, a truth universally acknowledged that a financial instrument in possession of a good reputation must be secure in its standing. But even the most carefully cultivated position can be imperiled by external events, and it is to the particulars of this situation that we must now turn.

Let us begin with VONG, a fund that, with a portfolio of 391 stocks, attempts a certain breadth, a democratic spread of ambition. Yet, beneath this veneer of inclusivity lies a pronounced preference for the technological. A substantial 59.7% of its holdings are devoted to the digital realm, a concentration exemplified by its top five constituents: Nvidia, holding court with 12.7% of the fund’s assets, followed by Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Broadcom. A familiar constellation, wouldn’t you say? It’s as if VONG, despite its numerical diversity, is merely a slightly more elaborate echo of the technological dominance that defines our age.

Four tech behemoths – Alphabet (Google, to its friends), Meta (formerly Facebook, still confusing some people), Microsoft, and Amazon – are collectively gearing up to spend close to $700 billion by 2026 on building out the data centers that will house all this artificial intelligence. That’s a colossal sum, enough to build a small country, or at least a very well-equipped server farm. These companies, you see, have stumbled upon the enviable position of generating vast amounts of cash from their existing businesses – Google’s near-monopoly on search, Meta’s mastery of social distraction, Microsoft’s enduring grip on office software, and Amazon’s relentless domination of online shopping and cloud services – which allows them to fund these ambitious, futuristic projects.

Everyone talks about ‘disruptive’ tech, about chasing the next unicorn. I’ve learned the hard way that most unicorns are just horses with glitter glued to them. Give me something…consistent. Something that won’t require me to explain to my broker why I thought a company that makes self-folding laundry was a good idea. Walmart, despite being the retail equivalent of beige, is that something. And, with $3,000, you can get a little slice of that beige for yourself.

However, the universe, as a general rule, dislikes monopolies. (It’s a deeply ingrained principle, somewhere between the second and third laws of thermodynamics.) And so, while Nvidia basks in the glow of its AI dominance, other contenders are emerging. One such contender, and the subject of our current investigation, is Broadcom. They’re a networking giant, responsible for ensuring that roughly 99% of all internet traffic doesn’t just… vanish into the ether. (A surprisingly common occurrence, if you don’t have the right infrastructure. Imagine the support tickets.)

One might be tempted to call this a buying opportunity. A ‘dip’, as the jargon has it. But a closer inspection reveals a company not so much wounded as… exhausted. It appears to have lost the knack of surprising anyone, and in the modern market, that is a fatal affliction.