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• Cheapest credit card? American Express

  Posted Apr 03 2008, 05:53 PM by Jon Markman
  Filed under: Investing, Interest rates, Visa, Jon Markman
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  Bummed that you missed the skyrocketing advance of credit card vendor Visa when it debuted as a stock last month? The 50% move higher in the shares in the first few days paid for a whole lot of shopping sprees among shareholders, you can be sure -- and they could pay with cash, not plastic.
  
  Well fret no more, because this crazy market is giving you another shot right now with the shares of the company behind a different credit card issuer: American Express. And the author of a brilliant new book about buying super-discounted stocks says this is one idea you should definitely not leave home without. 
  
  Vitaliy Katsenelson, a Denver portfolio manager whose cagey Active Value Investing was published last year, says Amex is one of the “cleanest” financial stocks you can buy right now, not to mention one of the cheapest. Its value is down, he says, because it is mistakenly lumped in both with banks and with companies that will suffer in a recession. He says that, to the contrary, Amex is in the virtually the same business as Visa and Mastercard, whose own shares are up a stunning 406% since they debuted in mid-2006: They just take fees from merchants and earn interest on cardholders’ balances.   Read More...

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• Why you can still profit from Visa

  Posted Mar 21 2008, 12:04 PM by Bradley Meacham
  Filed under: Investing, Visa
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  This post was written by MSN Money columnist Michael Brush:

  When Visa went public this week it was no surprise that investors applauded the IPO as "priceless."

  Though the bankers behind the deal priced Visa stock at $44 per share, it traded no lower than $55 Wednesday, its first day out. Then it closed above $64 on day two (Thursday).

  Investors scrambled to buy Visa shares for three reasons. First, the company will continue to benefit from a broad-based worldwide shift to the use plastic to pay for stuff. Visa also has plenty of cost cutting ahead to boost profit margins.

  Third, the deal was priced cheaply to move in a tough market -- which brings up another aspect of this IPO which was unsurprising. To get the stock at that heavily-discounted $44 per share ahead of the IPO, you had to have special connections inside the clubby investment banking network behind the IPO -- which was brought public by the likes of Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and JPMorgan Chase. Mere mortals, a.k.a. regular investors, need not apply.   Read More...

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