Meet the Latin American e-commerce platform that's outperforming Amazon this year

One of the world's largest e-commerce companies is emerging as a top pick on Wall Street as investors look for tech opportunities beyond the Magnificent Seven.

MercadoLibre, an Argentinian e-commerce and payments platform that's incorporated in Delaware and actively traded on Nasdaq, is up 34% in 2024, compared to a roughly 27% rise for Amazon, and 20% for the S&P 500. The company was founded 25 years ago by CEO Marcos Gaplerin at the height of the dot com boom. It now dominates online sales in Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Chile and makes up roughly half of online sales in South America, according to eMarketer. It also operates a digital payments platform called Mercado Pago.

Roughly 90% of Wall Street analysts who cover the stock rate it a "buy," with an average price target of $2,268 — about 8% upside from where it was trading this week, according to FactSet. There are no sell ratings.

Brad Gerstner of Altimeter Capital is one such bull. He highlighted expanding profit margins and MercadoLibre's AI potential as reasons he's "excited" by the stock.

"You look at companies like MercadoLibre ... a lot of companies that people have kind of forgotten about as [investors] moved in to the Magnificent Seven -- I think there are going to be a lot of internet companies that are benefited by AI," Gerstner told CNBC's Scott Wapner at the Goldman Sachs Communicopia conference this month. "It's not only margin expansion, but reacceleration at the top, where they can acquire customers, improve products in a way that make it easier for customers to buy, and take friction out of the system."

Galperin came up for the idea of MercadoLibre while he was a student at Stanford Graduate School of Business in Palo Alto, California. He started to look