Visa Inc.VCOMMENTDec 12, 2016Stock 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.
The dividend is under 1%, so this is not a Buy for him, as it is less than what he is required to have. There is a move towards less cash and paper, and more plastic. In the West, penetration rates are significantly higher than in the emerging market countries, and even in Europe. There is still lots of growth potential. This trades in the mid-20s PE, but this is a growth name and has traded above 20 for a long time. If you are waiting for it to get cheap, it is probably not going to happen. If you are looking for some real growth and have a 3 to 5 year time horizon, this makes sense.