Buy These 3 Growth Stocks Now, Ignore the Noise, and Thank Yourself Later
Key Points
Netflix's lower-priced plans and content investments are expanding its audience reach.
MercadoLibre has a massive advantage in Latin America with its scale and data.
Amazon is turning AI investments into revenue-generating products.
- 10 stocks we like better than Netflix ›
Economic worries and geopolitical flare-ups rattled stocks at the start of 2026, but the market's rebound in April shows how quickly sentiment can shift. If you're a long-term investor, you will rarely regret buying quality businesses when they're selling at a discount.
Three growth leaders that are still worth buying are Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX), MercadoLibre (NASDAQ: MELI), and Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN). Each dominates its market and continues to invest to extend its lead. Here's why this trio could reward patient investors from here.
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1. Netflix
Netflix is in a league of its own in entertainment. It spends billions on content each year and still delivers robust profits. It has also rolled out a fast-growing advertising business, making the service more affordable and expanding its addressable market.
Last year, ad revenue more than doubled to top $1.5 billion, and management is guiding for that figure to roughly double again to about $3 billion this year. Lower-priced plans are helping Netflix push its potential audience to 1 billion people.
Meanwhile, the company remains aggressive in expanding its already unmatched content offering. It plans to increase content spending by 10% to $20 billion in 2026, supporting a growing mix of live events, games, and podcasts. Combined with cheaper ad-supported plans, that could make Netflix even more essential for households.
Despite these tailwinds, the stock is down about 20% from its recent high, reflecting concerns about heavy spending and near-term uncertainty. Shares trade at 34 times this year's earnings estimate, but analysts forecast earnings growth of 21% annually over the next few years. That is enough growth to potentially support market-beating gains.
2. MercadoLibre
Latin America is one of the fastest-growing e-commerce markets in the world, and MercadoLibre is helping drive that growth in an underpenetrated region. It leads with 121 million marketplace shoppers and 78 million people using its digital payments services through Mercado Pago.
MercadoLibre is building the kind of scale advantage that helped Amazon dominate U.S. e-commerce. MercadoLibre's logistics network keeps expanding, and higher order volumes are driving down costs. Net profit margin has risen from virtually zero to about 7% over the past five years.
Higher order volumes and rising Mercado Pago transactions also generate more data, which the company can use with artificial intelligence (AI) to improve personalization and speed up credit decisions.
The stock is down 29% from its recent high, partly due to near-term margin pressure as the company invests in logistics and its fast-growing credit card business. That pullback has pushed its price-to-sales valuation to the lowest level in years, making the stock compelling right now.
3. Amazon
Investors know Amazon as the e-commerce leader, but it's also building a powerful edge in AI infrastructure that can strengthen the entire business.
Amazon's fastest-growing and most profitable segments are increasingly non-retail, led by Amazon Web Services (AWS). Its custom chips, including Trainium and Graviton, help customers achieve cost-efficient compute, supporting AWS' 24% year-over-year revenue growth last quarter. An acceleration in this growth rate as Amazon adds more data center capacity would be a bonus for investors.
Amazon plans to raise capital spending to roughly $200 billion in 2026, up 53% over 2025. This supports cloud growth and funds innovation that can improve the shopping experience.
Those investments are already showing up in products like Rufus, its AI shopping assistant, and Amazon Lens, its visual search feature. AI is also improving ad relevance on product pages and Prime Video, helping drive a 22% increase in ad revenue in 2025.
Wall Street may criticize heavy spending, but Amazon has a long track record of turning investments into revenue-producing products. That's why investors should ignore the noise and consider buying Amazon stock. It trades at less than 20 times trailing-12-month operating cash flow, making it a potential bargain.
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John Ballard has positions in Amazon. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Amazon, MercadoLibre, and Netflix. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
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