The biggest stock returns don’t always come from the safest bets.
Sometimes they come from taking big swings on companies you believe in.
This week on Ticker Take, we spoke with an entrepreneur-turned-investor who has done exactly that.
Ash Karbasfrooshan initially built his wealth as the founder and CEO of WatchMojo, one of the most successful independent video channels on YouTube. More recently, he’s made headlines for his efforts to bring the Montreal Expos back to the city.
Karbasfrooshan says he became an entrepreneur in part because of his desire to keep the team from leaving Montreal in 2004. “If you want to have an impact and you don’t have a wealthy billionaire uncle, you need to become an entrepreneur,” he said in our conversation. Twenty years later, sitting on a track record of building a media business, he realized bringing a franchise back doesn’t require one billionaire writing a big cheque. In 2026, he says, it’s about assembling a strong team of high net worth individuals and private equity players. He’s hopeful those efforts will help him keep the promise he made to himself, that if he was ever in a position to bring the Expos and Major League Baseball back to Montreal, he would.
In the meantime, he’s not sitting still. Alongside running his media business, he has built a self-directed stock portfolio focused on growth names in technology and digital media.
Karbasfrooshan’s investing approach is built around what he knows. Roughly half his assets are with professional managers who handle the traditional, “safer” side: blue chip names in banking and consumer products. The other half he manages himself, focused on growth in technology and digital media. Those are the areas that might be considered big swings, but they are businesses he knows well from 20 years inside the digital media business.
With that approach in mind, here are the 9 stocks he highlighted. As always, this is not financial advice.
Karbasfrooshan first had his eye on what was then Google about 25 years ago. He could see the search product was superior, the distribution was being built out, and acquisitions like DoubleClick were going to drive the monetization story. Today he calls Alphabet the best stock to own, because investors get exposure to search plus cloud, YouTube, Maps, Android, and more. One of the best performing stocks of the last two decades, in his view, and still well positioned for the decades to come.
The standout pitch on Karbasfrooshan’s list. When asked if there’s a company today that reminds him of YouTube 25 years ago, he says only one name comes to mind. Roblox. Both started as a different kind of media, dominated by user-generated content and a very young audience. But as that audience grows up, they stay on the platform, and the platform itself starts to look more traditional. More media companies show up. More advertisers move in.
Karbasfrooshan watched that arc happen at YouTube while building WatchMojo. He believes it’s happening again at Roblox. And he points to one big advantage Roblox has over YouTube in the early days. Two revenue streams out of the gates, advertising plus its in-platform currency Robux.
Karbasfrooshan calls Nvidia the classic picks and shovels company in an AI gold rush. Trying to pick the eventual AI winners, he says, could lead to carnage. But Nvidia is the foundation underneath all of it. He also calls it a bet on the person. Jensen Huang, in his words, is a fanatic founder and CEO. Even at today’s valuation, depending on your time horizon, he believes you can’t go wrong.
A controversial name because of Elon Musk, but Karbasfrooshan says Musk is one of the main reasons to own it. He sees Tesla as a platform rather than just a car company, with optionality in robotics, energy, and autonomous driving. There is hype in the stock, he acknowledges, the way there is with most growth companies. But Tesla has executed over a long period, and many of its competitors won’t be able to stay in the race.
Karbasfrooshan organizes his thinking on the internet around three pillars: content, commerce, and community. Commerce has the highest yield and is the easiest to monetize, and Amazon is the best proxy for the future of all commerce. AWS adds exposure to the cloud build-out alongside it. And every area Amazon enters, he says, it enters with a disciplined and focused approach. His view is that Amazon should be in any portfolio because it’s the best positioned company to benefit from sustained growth in commerce.
Cybersecurity used to feel optional. In 2026, Karbasfrooshan says, it’s like insurance. Most Fortune 500 companies and any small business operating online needs it. He cites former GE boss Jack Welch’s old rule that if you’re going to be in a business, you should be number one or number two in it. CrowdStrike, in his view, is the best of breed name in one of the fastest growing segments of the economy. Great execution, great leadership, and a stock that has performed phenomenally well and likely keeps doing so.
Karbasfrooshan calls MercadoLibre one of those rare stocks where you get a few things at once. The first is exposure to a fast-growing Latin American market. The second is a dynamic he has seen play out in places like Brazil and India: developing economies that skipped one phase of investment, such as landlines, ended up with much bigger growth in the next phase. The third is that MercadoLibre isn’t just Latin America’s Amazon. As he puts it, imagine a three-way child of Amazon, Shopify, and PayPal, operating in one of the fastest growing geographic markets in the world.
Karbasfrooshan notes that Warren Buffett bought Snowflake before its IPO, which is unusual for a value investor who tends to avoid money-losing tech. He sees Snowflake as a public market proxy for the story of data. AI, he points out, is only as good as the data feeding it. The way he explains it: just as Salesforce benefited from the professionalization of the sales organization, Snowflake is the best proxy for the professionalization of all data.
Whatever investors thought of Uber’s early disruption strategy, what they’ve built now is something almost nobody else has. A genuinely global network. Land in Miami, Mumbai, Madrid, or Moscow, and Uber is there. That’s the commonality. And in his view, Uber is still mostly a one trick pony, even with Uber Eats added on. The opportunity is in what the company can still build on top of one of the most attractive user bases in the world. For Karbasfrooshan, that’s the case at today’s price.
The Ticker Take
Across the 9 names, the common thread is conviction. Karbasfrooshan is buying companies he can explain, run by people who have already shown they can execute, with room to keep building.
None of these are safe picks, per se. But that’s his point. In life, he thinks risks are worth taking — as an entrepreneur, investor or in his attempts to become a baseball team owner. The traditional, defensive part of his portfolio is for the professionals. The growth side, he keeps for himself, since it’s part of his DNA.
Jon Erlichman is a BNN Bloomberg contributor and the host of Ticker Take on YouTube.
