MercadoLibre — Freshman Stock Pitch

The Freshman Stock Pitch Competition is the Notre Dame Investment Club's entry-level pitch contest, where teams research a public company, build a full valuation model, and defend an investment thesis in front of a panel. Our four-person group covered MercadoLibre (NASDAQ: MELI) and issued a BUY with a $2,413.80 price target against a $1,773.96 share price — 36.1% implied upside.

MercadoLibre is best understood as the Amazon and PayPal of Latin America. The e-commerce marketplace connects buyers and sellers across the region at roughly a 21% take rate, supported by Mercado Envíos, an in-house logistics network delivering about half of shipments same or next day. Mercado Pago, the fintech arm, layers payments, consumer and merchant credit, and digital banking on top. Brazil drives about half of revenue and is the core profit engine, Mexico is the fastest-growing market, and Argentina contributes high volatility alongside high engagement.

Our first thesis pillar was the flywheel itself: commerce, payments, logistics, and credit reinforce one another in a way competitors cannot easily replicate, because each additional user makes the proprietary logistics network and credit underwriting data more valuable. The second was that the market's pessimism about take-rate and margin compression was unwarranted — lower free-shipping thresholds and take rates are what defend the moat, and those effects fade as rates stabilize. Underneath both sits a structural opportunity: formal credit penetration across Latin America remains far below developed markets, leaving thin-file consumers and small businesses that traditional underwriting simply cannot reach.

We modeled the company to roughly 25%+ revenue CAGR through 2028 and framed the outcome as a scenario band rather than a point estimate — a (29.5)% bear, our 36.1% base, and a 77.8% bull. This was my first competitive pitch, and defending valuation assumptions live pushed me past surface-level analysis into a thesis I could actually argue.