Visa Inc.VCOMMENTAug 14, 2015Stock 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.
North America has been the lead in the declining use of cash and well ahead of other geographies, especially China and emerging markets. We are still in the early days, and there is still a significant transformation to take place. This company stands to benefit. The chart is basically straight up and on a valuation basis you have to scratch your head and ask how much of that is priced in. He feels there is still a lot of upside, but you have to be willing to accept some volatility. You can buy in and then buy more on weakness, or wait to step in on weakness, but the risk is that you are going to continue to miss upside.