Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Visa, Mastercard, ASML, TSMC, Costco and Apple are wonderful businesses worth holding forever at a fair price; none is cheap, and that is the point. Each has a durable moat: Search and YouTube, 3.6 billion daily users, enterprise switching costs, CUDA, card-payment toll booths, the only EUV machines, leading-edge chipmaking at scale, Costco's 92% renewal rate and Apple's 2.5 billion devices. Most pair high margins and returns on capital with strong growth. … Show more

Mastercard is the preferred pick in the Visa-Mastercard duopoly because it grows faster, though both are superb and owning either or both is reasonable. Visa leads on scale with about 60% of global card volume versus Mastercard's 30%, and is more defensive given its big US debit share. Mastercard earns more from higher-fee cross-border transactions and sells services like analytics, fraud prevention and cybersecurity, a recurring segment growing 20%+ a year. Visa's operating margin tops 65%. … Show more

Visa's roughly 30x earnings multiple and $750 billion valuation leave less upside than other opportunities, even if it keeps executing; the best case may be another doubling over a few years. Its once-impenetrable moat may look different in five years, while its reputation as a safe compounder is already priced in. This is a relative judgment, not a prediction that Visa cannot keep rising. x.com  x.com  x.com  x.com  x.com 

NVIDIA, Broadcom and Mastercard are the favorite high-margin compounders, in that order, following Peter Lynch's view that higher profit margins make better companies. NVIDIA leads with a 72% net income margin, ahead of Mastercard at 46% and Broadcom at 42%. x.com  x.com  x.com  x.com 

Visa still collects the toll on payment rails, with ROIC near 38% against a cost of capital near 8% and about a 4% shareholder yield. Revenue rose 14% to $11.6 billion. The line to watch is cross-border, its highest-margin revenue: volume grew 12% but related revenue only 6%, so the price per transaction is slipping, and client incentives rose to 28.7% of gross revenue, where take-rate pressure shows first. About a third of EPS growth came from buybacks. x.com 

Visa and Mastercard are at their most reasonable valuations in nearly a decade while remaining as dominant as ever. The duopoly takes a small slice of nearly every digital payment worldwide, with no credit risk, near-unbeatable moats and legendary margins. In the 2021 bubble they traded at 50-60 times free cash flow, leaving little margin of safety; normalization and temporary headlines have cut that to the mid-to-high 20s. A rare chance to buy two elite compounders at a steep discount. x.com 

Nvidia, Alphabet, Visa, Amazon, Adobe, Mastercard, Microsoft, Nu, Meta and Netflix are elite earnings compounders worth owning for the next decade. As Peter Lynch said, over the long term there is a 100% correlation between a company's earnings and its stock price. x.com  x.com  x.com  x.com  x.com  x.com  x.com  x.com  x.com  x.com 

Visa and Mastercard look like attractive, safe cash machines at decade-low valuations, likely compounding 10-15% a year from here. Mastercard trades at 23x forward earnings, its lowest in a decade, and Visa at 22x; Mastercard just bounced off its 200-week moving average, untouched since 2022. They will not 10x in ten years but should protect the downside. Visa is slightly preferred for its sheer size, though Mastercard grows faster. x.com 

Visa and Mastercard are quietly compounding free cash flow per share, but their share prices have not caught up. They usually do. x.com 

Dividend growth stocks have quietly outperformed the S&P 500 for decades, making Broadcom, Visa, S&P Global, Costco, Mastercard, Texas Instruments, Microsoft, PepsiCo, Starbucks and NVIDIA ten to buy and hold forever. x.com  x.com  x.com  x.com  x.com  x.com  x.com  x.com  x.com  x.com