Visa Inc.VDON'T BUYAug 17, 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.
This and MasterCard (MA-N) trade in the mid-20 multiples and are growing nicely. His reticence is that they are priced as though they are going to stay really great financial businesses. His worry in the financial sector is not just with the banking sector, but also with the card sector. There is a lot of new FinTech today that could be highly disruptive. He would not be a buyer of either right now because of the valuations.