Visa Inc.VCOMMENTDec 17, 2013Stock price when the opinion was issued
As of Sep 25, 2026. Market Open.
You'd have to go back a very long time to find his firm holding MA. Owned V for a long time, mainly on the valuation differential. MA has always been 4-6 multiple points higher. Visa is better value. Likes the space.
V might be stronger on the debit card side, which is growing at a faster rate than the credit side. Likes management. PE in the 20s, a discount to normalized multiples. Consistent, predictable. Earnings continue to do well. Nice hedge to a lot of companies that are in the news.
Visa and Mastercard have been treading water the past year because the market has been fixated on AI, but that money has been rotating out of AI into places like credit cards. The two companies have some of the best business models, big moats and trading at attractive PEs, though neither are at decades-long low PEs. Visa's layoff of 7% of workforce is good for the stock. Probably AI is making Visa more productive.
Mastercard and Visa have been weak because cash-to-card conversion has historically been the easiest thing for them to do but is now over. Value-added services are instead driving more growth. Agentic AI traffic is about to go parabolic, so can the cards play the role of authentication layer? He thinks so, and they should. Stablecoins and peer-to-peer transactions are not big deals, not major threats.
This whole space is extremely appealing. They just settled on the swipe transaction fees. This is not over yet as the merchants and the big box retailers are saying that the settlement and the rules do not go far enough. There are a couple of really strong trends that are really taking hold. First of all, we need this economy to pick up and he believes it has and retail spending, cashless payments and mobile payments are becoming a bigger and bigger part of it. In this same space, eBay (EBAY-Q) is interesting, it is only up 3% this year. They own PayPal, which, traditionally online, has started to move off-line. Likes the whole space.