The market’s making some big moves recently, and you do not need a lot of money to take advantage of this volatility. With so many different trading platforms offering a commission-free move, it has never been cheaper to invest in stocks even with modest amounts. With even more brokers being open to trading fractional shares, you also do not have to limit your small investments to stocks that have smaller price tags.
Here are three stocks that look great right now. Investing your next $500 into any of these might be a smart move.
MercadoLibre
Latin America’s top online marketplace operator is only getting larger and better, but the same cannot be said about its stock value. It just had another amazing quarter, but it is somehow still trading 44% under the all-time high it reached 14 months ago.
There are about 82.2 million unique active users throughout the MercadoLibre ecosystem, and revenue has soared 74% for its latest quarter. There was around $8 billion in gross merchandise volume that was transacted through its flagship e-commerce marketplace in the last three months of 2021, but the main story is fintech. MercadoPago, its faster-growing payment system, raked in $24 billion for the last three months of 2021.
With its stock price valued over $1,100, $500 will not be able to buy you one single share of MercadoLibre. But as more brokers are letting their customers purchase fractional shares, it is making it possible for any investor to purchase a portion of the top player of Latin American fintech and e-commerce.
Twilio
Your cell phone has now become a smartphone, and Twilio gets much of the credit for making that happen behind the scenes. Twilio is a top provider of the in-app communication solutions, the platform of choice for a lot of your favorite applications. When your takeout-delivery service sends you a notification that your delivery driver is getting close or when you get an almost instant confirmation on a newly available vacation villa, that is Twilio in action.
Twilio is seeing healthy growth. Armed with powerful retention rates and an ever-growing client base that trusts Twilio’s new offerings, this is a great play on the smartphone revolution.
ZIM Integrated Services
This past year was a good time to be an international container shipping specialist. Businesses paid a premium to get their stuff imported, and the Israeli-based business was a beneficiary of all the panic buying and supply chain issues that pushed transportation prices so high. ZIM is trading at just 2.5 times trailing earnings. It also pays a variable dividend that is based on earnings, and that payout consists of 20% of quarterly its earnings and another 30% that is distributed based on the entire year income.
This can sound too good to be true, and the caveat is that business is not likely to come close to where it was in 2021. Business will probably normalize in 2022 or be disrupted by warfare in Eastern Europe. Net incomes will see a decline, the earnings multiple will go higher, and the yield will decrease. I still think ZIM is an attractively priced stock, and it is hard to beat the large payout as we wait for business to slow down. ZIM reports financial results next week, offering us a better glimpse of how the near-term is going.
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