Been thinking a lot about which long term stocks to buy heading into the second half of 2026, and honestly, there are some plays that just keep looking better the more I dig into them.

Let me start with the obvious one - Nvidia. Look, everyone knows the story by now. They're sitting at the top of the market cap rankings and they're not there by accident. The GPU shortage narrative is real. While competitors are still trying to convince people their chips are viable alternatives, Nvidia's literally telling people they're sold out. That's a flex. The data center capex projections going to 3-4 trillion annually by 2030 give them a runway that's honestly hard to bet against. If you're looking at long term stocks to buy with real staying power, this is it.

But here's the thing - Nvidia doesn't actually make their own chips. That's where Taiwan Semiconductor comes in. TSM is the actual manufacturer, and they're the only one with the tech and scale to do what Nvidia needs. Their 2nm node is already in the market now, and the efficiency gains are exactly what the industry is demanding. This is one of those boring, essential plays that just keeps printing. Long term, this is foundational.

Amazon's interesting because people wrote them off in 2025. But their cloud business is waking up again with all the AI workloads migrating over. E-commerce is still dominant, advertising is solid. Yeah, they had a rough year relative to the market, but that just means the risk-reward is better now. I think a lot of people are sleeping on how positioned they are for the infrastructure buildout happening right now.

MercadoLibre is the one that gets me excited though. People call it the Amazon of Latin America, but that's underselling it. They've got e-commerce, delivery, and fintech all woven together. That's a different beast than Amazon's model. The stock is down about 16% from highs and trading at a crazy valuation relative to what they're actually doing. If Latin America keeps growing - and there's no reason to think it won't - this thing has serious upside. This is a long term stocks to buy situation where you're betting on an entire region's development.

Alphabet proved something important in 2025. Everyone thought they were done. Google Search was supposedly dead. But Gemini actually turned out to be competitive, and they integrated AI into search in a way that actually works. Market share came back. That's the kind of resilience you want in a long term position. They're positioned well for whatever the AI infrastructure story becomes next.

The thing these five have in common is they're not going anywhere. They've got competitive moats that are genuinely hard to break. If you're thinking about long term stocks to buy and you want to actually sleep at night knowing your capital is in solid places, this is a solid starting five. The valuations on some of these are actually reasonable right now too, which is rare when everyone's talking about AI.

Obviously do your own research and all that, but yeah - these are the ones I keep coming back to when I think about where to actually put money for the next few years.