The Best Stocks to Invest in Right Now for 2026: Better Than Nvidia?

MercadoLibre is projected to be a better short and long-term investment than Amazon, despite Amazon's domestic dominance in the U.S. with a 40% market share, its large and profitable AWS (Amazon Web Services) cloud operations, and its significant advantage in e-commerce volume. The advantage, however, is currently being impacted by the increased investment in AI and increased competition, which are creating pressure on share prices. Conversely, MercadoLibre has successfully established itself as the "digital backbone" of the Latin American market. Unlike many areas across the world that are hindered by poor infrastructure, MercadoLibre's comprehensive logistics and finance digital ecosystem are massive competitive advantages for the company.

Through its own delivery network named Mercado Envíos, MercadoLibre provides a much higher degree of reliability than other companies operating in this region, as it currently handles 95% of its own deliveries. In addition, Mercado Pago offers a unique service by providing financial services to the underbanked population within Latin America and solving a significant problem for them. MercadoLibre has shown exponential growth over the recent years with an 83% increase in its credit portfolio to $11 billion at the end of 2025 and has delivered more than 30% revenue growth for 27 consecutive quarters. Therefore, this illustrates a rarity for companies experiencing both hyper-growth and still maintaining profitability.

As an investment, MercadoLibre represents the opportunity to invest in the developing digital payments and commerce markets, as there are signals for structural shifts toward these markets within Latin America, whereas Amazon is now navigating through a more saturated and capital-intensive phase of its life cycle. 

Between AbbVie and Eli Lilly, Eli Lilly is a clear leader in healthcare for 2026. AbbVie has established itself as a strong “Dividend King,” providing good dividends and accomplishing drug success with drugs such as Skyrizi and Rinvoq that have replaced the decline of Humira. However, Eli Lilly is creating a massive change in the GLP-1 market with the success of its drugs before, or for the most part, even coming out of the research phase. At the end of 2025, Eli Lilly surpassed Novo Nordisk and extended its market dominance, commanding 60% of U.S. prescriptions for drugs designed to treat obesity and Type-2 diabetes.

Eli Lilly’s new oral pill, orforglipron, and its triple hormone agonist, retatrutide, have positioned Eli Lilly with a new pipeline of drugs that could potentially launch a new body of science in how we treat chronic metabolic disease. If the oral pill is approved in early 2026, it will disrupt the market because it provides a smaller and more readily available product line than injectables. It also will require less scale than injectables to deploy on a large scale. Therefore, although AbbVie’s products offer safety and dividends, Eli Lilly's growth in terms of revenue, illustrated by a year-over-year (YoY) revenue growth of 54% as it approaches Q3 2025, combined with being the leading manufacturer in a therapeutic area that may exceed $100 billion on a total net product basis in 2030 demonstrates that it should be chosen.

Alphabet will remain a strong investment in 2026 due to the company's ability to develop products and services that integrate software with hardware infrastructure supporting the growing AI ecosystem. Many have viewed companies such as Nvidia and Taiwan Semiconductor as the only possible ways to play in the growing AI trend; however, Alphabet provides an element of diversification due to its broad product offerings. Alphabet is both a major buyer of AI computing power and a seller of AI computing power via Google Cloud, whose revenues grew by 34% and experienced a significant increase in operating margin during the late part of 2025.

Also, one reason to invest in Alphabet heading into 2026 is the company's backlog of $155 billion in deferred sales contracts, which reflects a large demand for its AI-enabled infrastructure. While at first there was concern that AI would negatively impact Google Search, Alphabet's market share has remained approximately 90% of the search engine market globally, with increased usage being driven by both Alphabet's AI enablement initiative as well as the use of AI Overviews to increase query counts. Coupled with the predictable, stable, high gross margin recurring revenue generated by YouTube's 125 million paid users, as well as the emergence of its Waymo autonomous vehicle initiative, Alphabet represents an overall ecosystem advantage that hardware-only companies do not have. In addition, Alphabet's price/earnings ratio is reasonable in relation to its growth rate, which makes Alphabet an important foundational component of any growth portfolio.

Nvidia (NVDA) and Taiwan Semiconductor (TSM) provide AI with processing power, but Vertiv supplies data centers with an often underappreciated specialized infrastructure. With the shift towards higher-density, heat-producing AI chips, Vertiv's cooling and power technologies will be vital in supporting data centers.

Investors interested in "picking and shovels" in AI infrastructure should consider investing in Vertiv as a way to access the data center space. Irrespective of which chip manufacturer emerges victoriously from its market-share struggle, all companies will need the infrastructure that Vertiv provides to operate the equipment.

While Nvidia's revenue growth of 62% in its most recent quarterly report is impressive, its share price is reflective of the high expectations of future growth and, therefore, susceptible to considerable downward corrections. Vertiv, on the other hand, has a price-to-earnings ratio of approximately 30 based on next year’s anticipated earnings, along with an average annualised data center growth rate of 23% until 2030. Its prefabricated OneCore and SmartRun solutions enable quicker data center construction, making it more competitive relative to its competitors, as time-to-market is so critical at this time.

Nu Holdings is the best growth pick in financials for 2026, with greater potential growth than traditional banks or even U.S. fintechs like SoFi. Nu Holdings, a Brazil-based digital bank, has proven to be very successful in capturing market share in areas which are traditionally expensive and challenging to access using traditional banks. Nu Holdings has successfully grown its user base at the highest rate possible while also having a lower cost of servicing than a typical bank or fintech. Furthermore, the company is continuing to enter new markets and applying for a bank charter in the U.S.

Nu Holdings was chosen over the other fintech companies due to its significant regional dominance and a successful footprint in Mexico and Colombia. SoFi has developed a large user base of young customers in the U.S.; however, Nu Holdings is operating in an area that is far less competitive with existing digital-native banks, giving the company the ability to expand its margins aggressively. As we enter into 2026, Nu Holdings is poised to take advantage of the digitalization of the Latin American economy and serve as both a bank and an access point to financial services for millions of new users.

For those investors looking for a middle ground between large technology growth companies and stable consumer staples, Walmart is the best option for 2026. Smaller-sized retailers' growth companies like Dutch Bros are very expensive compared to Walmart and are vulnerable to drastic shifts in consumer taste; however, due to its massive scale, Walmart dominates with its low prices and much more effective logistics experience. Walmart has turned thousands of its stores into ship-from-store fulfillment centers, setting the stage for it to be able to compete with Amazon regarding delivery speed.

The strategic argument to have Walmart stock in your 2026 portfolio is because of "high cash flow durability" and navigating into higher-margin businesses, such as digital marketing and membership programs. Walmart's advertising business grew worldwide by 53% at the end of 2025; more than 75% of the market share gains came from households with earnings greater than $100,000. This move to wealthier customers helps to protect against recessions and declining economies. Walmart is a Dividend King with 52 consecutive years of increasing dividends, giving investors a steady income that the more high-technology-heavy portfolios may not always provide.

Those seeking to invest in 2026 can best achieve this by focusing on high-quality businesses that execute well regardless of market conditions rather than trying to "time" the market correctly. Additionally, it is beneficial to diversify an investment portfolio across multiple industries (e.g., e-commerce, healthcare, and industrial infrastructure), ensuring investments will not be unduly dependent upon a single trend such as AI.

When selecting companies, look for ones that can fund their future growth but are not currently riding the wave of popularity. In addition, by investing in companies that continue to perform well regardless of the state of the economy, investors can provide themselves with the potential for some protection against short-term volatility in the markets.

The long-term investment goal should be to establish, hold, and develop a diversified portfolio of companies that are defining the "backbone" of industry segments, rather than simply participating in a popular trend.