Visa Inc.VCOMMENTAug 03, 2016Stock price when the opinion was issued
As of Sep 04, 2026. Market Open.
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.
Both are phenomenal businesses. Comparable on valuation and share price performance. If you own one, don't switch.
His clients own Visa, and have for a very long time. Makes the most sense for him as more payments become digitized and V captures more market share. It's the largest payment network, so its profitability is a bit higher on margins. Bit north of 20x PE, FCF yield north of 4%. Attractive valuation for an essential business.
The dispute with Walmart (WMT-N) is a small deal, but the importance of the issue is for the potential of this becoming a much bigger issue internationally. Visa has a very good position and is the #1 card globally. It does more transactions and business than American Express (AXP-N), MasterCard (MA-N) and Discovery combined. Recently struck a deal to buy Visa Europe, which he feels is going to be very additive. Europeans tend to use more cash and less plastic, so there is lots of opportunity to catch some business there.