Market Mad House

In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. Friedrich Nietzsche

Visa (NYSE: V)

Market Insanity

Is Visa (NYSE: V) the perfect stock for the Coronavirus Age?

If these claims are true, Visa is the world’s electronic payment processor. Hence, Visa (NYSE: V) owns the infrastructure the world needs now.

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Long Ideas

American Express is a Great Dividend Stock

That attention to value and customer’s needs is American Express’s true value.

Specifically, Amex understands that its customers are human beings with specific needs and desires. American Express buys its customers’ loyalty with attention to their needs.

To put it differently, American Express owes its continued success to good old-fashioned customer service. Amex justifies its interest rates and fees with a high level of customer service.

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Opportunities

Is Visa (V) Making Money?

Visa (V) is the world’s largest payment platform. To demonstrate Statista reports there were 755 million Visa cards in circulation worldwide in 1st Quarter 2018. In particular, there were 342 million Visa cards in the United States in 1st Quarter 2018.

In contrast Statista estimates there were 244 million PayPal (NASDAQ: PYPL) accounts worldwide in 2nd Quarter 2018. Correspondingly, Statista estimates there were 127 million Apple Pay users worldwide in 2017. Importantly, many of these Apple Pay users are making payments with Visa through Apple Pay.

Therefore, Visa (V) has a vast advantage over any potential competitor. Its platform is almost six times as large as Apple Pay and over three times as large as PayPal’s.

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Grocery Wars

Shell Accepts Chase Pay at Gas Pumps

The Drive did not say whether Shell will start accepting other popular QR Code based solutions like Alipay and Walmart Pay at its stations. Chase needs to justify the $100 million it invested in mobile-wallet technology, the Drive reported. Unfortunately the Drive did not say what Shell stations will accept Chase Pay.

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Cryptocurrency

Cryptocurrency Visas Shut Down

“Visa have today instructed us that we must close all WaveCrest issued Visa Prepaid Cards with immediate effect,” an email from WaveCrest states. WaveCrest had a license to issue Visa-branded credit, debit, and prepaid cards which was apparently yanked early in January.

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Cryptocurrency

Raiden Network Token – the Cryptocurrency that Tried to Lower its Value

Raiden is designed to solve the biggest problem with the existing Ethereum network. The current Ethereum network can only process around 10 payments a second; the Brainbot team hopes to build a network that can complete around 100,000 transfers a second.

The long-term goal at brainbot is to build a network that will become a “global scale payment infrastructure” similar to that operated by Visa (NYSE: V). If that goal was achieved the Raiden Network would be even bigger than Visa’s. The current VisaNet can handle 24,000 transactions a second, or 150 million transactions a day.

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Cryptocurrency

Should we Tax Data or Advertising to Fund Basic Income?

“We could hold Google and Facebook and all those big multinationals accountable; we could make sure that people; like those who are currently ‘voluntarily’ contributing their data to pump up companies’ profits are given something that is adequate to support their livelihoods in exchange,” Fuller said.

Fuller’s idea makes a lot of sense because most of those companies’ values come from the data they collect and disseminate. Figuring out how to charge a tax on that data will be difficult because much of its value is theoretical.

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CryptocurrencyOpportunities

Visa and the Value in Payments

Nor are mobile wallets such as PayPal, Apple Pay, Walmart Pay, Android Pay, Samsung Pay, and Alipay, automatically a threat to Visa’s business.

Only 16% of Americans said they had used a mobile wallet in 2015, a JPMorgan Chase survey indicates. The same survey found that only 56% of large businesses and 25% of small businesses were accepting payments from such mobile wallets.

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Crazy Stocks

Wells Fargo and the Future of Monster Banking

The potential challenges Wells Fargo faces are vast. The greatest of these is falling revenues, which probably reflects the growing implosion of the mortgage market.

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Good Stocks

Surprise American Express is Growing Again

There is a reason why simple reason why American Express is still growing again. Basic credit card services are still a great product for which there is tremendous demand.

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