Mastercard Is in Millions of Portfolios. Last Quarter, Elite Investors Were Quietly Buying Its Rival

Seth Klarman’s Baupost Group opened a new position in Visa (NYSE:V | V Price Prediction) during the first quarter of 2026, disclosing 701,355 shares valued at $211,978,000 in the 13F filed May 15, 2026. That stake ran roughly 4.14% of the disclosed portfolio, which for a manager who has spent four decades apologizing for the stocks he owns is a loud way to plant a flag.

Klarman is a patience-first allocator. Baupost’s letters return to the same themes year after year: margin of safety, patience, avoiding businesses whose economics can be undone by a single regulation or a single competitor. A fresh Visa position at these prices suggests he sees the card-network duopoly as more durable than the current stablecoin panic implies. Mastercard (NYSE:MA) already sits in almost every diversified portfolio a retirement investor owns, so the interesting question is why a value investor with Klarman’s discipline chose the other rail.

What the Operating Numbers Say

Visa’s most recent quarter, reported July 28, 2026, showed net revenue of $11.63 billion, up 14.4% year over year, with non-GAAP EPS of $3.32 against a $3.23 consensus. That was the fourth consecutive EPS beat. Data processing revenue rose 17%, cross-border volume excluding intra-Europe rose 12% on a constant-dollar basis, and management repurchased about 14.5 million shares at an average price of $331, with $28.4 billion of buyback authorization remaining. Mastercard’s own quarter was strong. Nobody is arguing MA is broken. The question is relative value.

Visa trades at a trailing P/E near 31x and a forward P/E around 24x. Mastercard trades at a trailing P/E near 31x and a forward P/E around 29x. Same duopoly, similar margins, and the market is charging you meaningfully more per dollar of forward earnings to own Mastercard. That spread is the thesis in a single number.

The Stablecoin Backdrop

Where the two diverge in narrative is stablecoin settlement. Visa has run issuer settlement on public stablecoin rails for several years, while Mastercard has positioned later through its Multi-Token Network and bank-gateway approach.

Neither company has publicly attributed any fund’s trade to this gap, and Klarman did not either. Still, if stablecoin settlement compresses card economics over the next decade, being early on the infrastructure side is worth something, and Visa was early.

Elite managers did not move in one direction. Soros Fund Management opened a new Mastercard position of 30,452 shares valued at $15,215,646 in the same filing set, a reminder that reasonable managers still see the trade both ways. Klarman’s Visa commitment was the larger and more prominent of the two flags planted last quarter, and Baupost’s reputation for concentration on high-conviction ideas is what gives it weight.

For a Mastercard holder heading into retirement, both networks still compound, and the position is worth keeping. But if you already own the widely-held name and are steering fresh capital, Klarman’s position is a defensible template. Follow the thesis. Visa’s cheaper forward earnings and earlier stablecoin footprint justify new money at these prices, rather than the trade itself.

Not a Huge Difference Between the Two

You should keep in mind that the difference between Mastercard and Visa remains small. Over both the long term and the short term, both companies have been almost neck-and-neck. Any differences you will notice are usually in the single digits and are not worth fretting over. If V stock goes down, so will MA, and vice versa.

That said, if you are searching for slightly more gains and a barely cheaper stock on a forward earnings basis, I’d go with V stock over MA.

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