MA is a strong buy due to high EPS growth and a PE multiple below historical averages, offering dual engines of outperformance.

Bill Ackman added four financial stocks. He went heavy into financials like Visa, Mastercard, ICE, and S&P Global. I predicted in this video right here that he would either be adding Meta or Mastercard to his portfolio.

But what's interesting now is we also see that he has indeed added Mastercard to his portfolio.

MasterCard is still down by 3%. ICE down by 16% and S&P Global down by 26.16% and if we look at them year-to-date, it's really not that much more impressive. MasterCard is essentially flat, Visa up about 4.2%, ICE down four, and S&P Global down by 19%.

What we can see in the case of Mastercard, if we start with shareholder yield, is their dividend yield is low. It's about 0.6%. Now, keep in mind historically they have been a phenomenal dividend grower, exceptional dividend growth with a 10-year dividend cagr of 16%.

But again, the point is Mastercard has been an incredible dividend grower. Now, with that being said, if we also account for their share buybacks, their shareholder yield is sitting at about 3%.

They bought 3% of their outstanding shares in 2025, extremely impressive.

So, with that being said, their expected return would already be sitting at 3% without accounting for any change in the valuation multiple, and without any change in earnings growth.

But what do we know about Mastercard? Well, Mastercard grows earnings at a high rate. In fact, if we go ahead and jump over to our sensitivity analysis, come up here and plug in Mastercard.

One of the cool features of Ticker Data is you can automatically import the estimated EPS average from analyst over the next few years. And Mastercard has a projected EPS cagr of 15.3%.

So, that's very rapid earnings growth. So, let's take that into consideration for a moment when looking at Bogle's valuation. Assume they actually pull off 15% earnings growth.

What you're looking at? 15% earnings growth, shareholder yield of 3%. All of a sudden, your expected return is sitting at 18% without any change in the valuation multiple. So, we're talking about very potential strong returns.

And this is exactly what he highlights. We expect the principal driver of our portfolio company stock price performance to be earnings per share growth they delivered due to their high growth rates and long-term sustainable competitive advantages, which served to preserve and enhance their market position.

While in the short-term, earnings per share growth does not guarantee higher stock prices, over the long-term we expect long-term growth in EPS and economic earnings to drive increases in the intrinsic value and stock prices of our holdings.

So, he points out something extremely important. In the short-term, what changes the stock price? Well, it's changes in the valuation multiple. It takes time to grow earnings at 15%.

Even if it grows 15% over the next year, in the short-term, over the next week, we could see a 10% decline in the valuation multiple, which of course ends up leading to negative expected returns.

But what he wisely points out is that in the long run, it's earnings growth that pushes share prices higher. This is why essentially anytime you look at a stock like MasterCard that has exceptional long-term performance, take a close look at what their earnings per share and free cash flow per share growth looks like.

Earnings per share was sitting at $3.36 in 2015, by 2025 16.55. What do you notice about these numbers? Earnings per share grew by approximately 5x during this time period. Look at the share price, essentially a 500% increase.

The stock followed the earnings growth of the company.

So, yes, in the short-term, it's changes in the valuation multiple that impact the stock price, but in the long-term, it's rising earnings per share. Now, this actually makes a lot of sense because when we look at the share price of the stocks that Bill Ackman mentioned he's buying, yes, they're all down by a decent amount in the last year, but that's not due to drop in earnings growth, it's due to a change in the valuation multiple.

What we're looking at here is the PE multiple for all four of these stocks. Every single one is sitting at a PE multiple that's quite a bit lower than its five-year average.

Now, let's again, let's take a closer look at MasterCard all by itself. What we can see here on Ticker is five years ago at one point the PE multiple for MasterCard was sitting at 39. They were trading at 39 times earnings.

Now, obviously we could sit here and debate whether or not that's justified. That's certainly a very high premium. But even then, the average PE multiple for MasterCard was 31.42.

It was just a couple of months ago that the PE multiple got all the way down to 23.6. Now, one of the things we have to keep in mind is yes, MasterCard has seen a bit of a run-up particularly in just the last couple of months as we can see right here.

But with Bill Ackman revealing his purchases, these would have been purchases that were made during Q2. Basically from April, May to June. Which we can see was putting them in the low 500, high $400 share price range.

Which ironically enough, if you've been keeping up with my portfolio updates, you know MasterCard was a stock that we added just a few months ago as well. We're up about 15% on this position already because ironically enough, we also added during Q2 of 2026.

So, a little confirmation bias from successful billionaire investors never hurts. But what Bill Ackman wisely realized is both of the engines of outperformance are now working for MasterCard.

We now have a stock that will potentially see exceptional earnings growth moving forward and the potential for multiple expansion.

So, for example, if we see a 20% increase in the valuation multiple over the next decade, that's about 2% a year. When you combine earnings growth, shareholder yield, and multiple expansion, your expected returns are just astronomical. They are extremely strong.

If we take a more detailed look at this and simply run it through our sensitivity analysis. Again, assume EPS growth of about 15% and assume that the PE multiple, which by the way is still at about 18% discount to how it's historically traded, you're talking about compounded returns of 15 to 16% not including dividends over the next 5 to 6 years.

Now again, we focused on MasterCard, but it's worth pointing out that all four of these companies, well, there's definitely some major differences particularly with ICE and S&P Global, are very capital light businesses that generate high levels of return on invested capital.

Why is that so important to understand? Well, look at MasterCard. When you look at return on invested capital, you can see it's just exceptional, anywhere from around 48% to around 33% over the last few years.

What does that actually mean? Well, it means the returns that the company gets from reinvesting back into the business are extremely high. So, we can actually kind of back into exactly how MasterCard is using their free cash flow.

We already know when we look at the dividend breakdown sheet, they used about 16% of their free cash flow in 2025 to pay out dividends.

How much did they do in share buybacks? Well again, we can get a little insight because we were just looking at Bogle's valuation and we can see they reduced their shares outstanding from 2024 to 2025 by about 3%.

Now obviously, the price these share buybacks were performed at matters substantially and there's no exact way to know where they were buying back these shares. But assuming they bought them back roughly in an average share price of about $500 per share, and seeing that they bought back 28 million shares outstanding, let's run the math.

When we run the math using the very fancy valuation model that I created, what we can see is 28 million * 500, they used about $14 billion of free cash flow to buy back shares.

Now, put that into perspective to how much free cash flow they generated in 2025, which was 16.9 billion. So, 16.9 billion, we'll write that down in our model, and then here's the math we need to do.

What percentage of free cash flow was used to buy back shares? It would have been around 82%, close to 83%.

So, if we jump back over to our capital allocation sheet, all of a sudden, what we can see is Mastercard used essentially all of their free cash flow to buy back shares and pay out dividends.

Now, sometimes that's a major red flag, but not in the case for stocks like Visa and Mastercard. Why? Well, it's because these are companies that can see exceptional growth happen with very little reinvestment back into the business.

They're benefiting from secular tailwinds. What does that actually mean? Well, it means more people are starting to use credit cards. There's more online payments taking place.

They're going to benefit from agentic commerce. Very soon, you'll be able to tell your AI agent of choice to book you a flight and trip to New York City. It's going to handle everything.

It's going to book your rental car. It's going to book your flight. It's going to book your hotel. And Mastercard has the infrastructure in place to make this happen already. They already have the fraud prevention in place.

So, again, they need to reinvest very little capital back into the business, meaning it's very easy for them to actually generate high returns on invested capital because they really don't reinvest a whole lot back into the business.

So, again, a lot of these companies are different in nature, but they certainly fall under the criteria of stocks that Bill Ackman looks for, which of course is obvious. That's why he added to his portfolio, and it's something I recognized 8 months ago.

He even noted in his letter to shareholders that the annual returns the investments generate will be primarily driven by two factors, the growth of EPS in the business and the change in the earnings multiple, the valuation multiple.

So again, he's looking at things through the sources of returns. He realizes if he can find stocks growing EPS at a high rate while also trading at a PE multiple that's below what's a fair multiple, then what happens?

He can benefit from both of the sources of outperformance, the engines of outperformance.

So I added MasterCard to my portfolio in the exact same range that Bill Ackman did. And yes, it's already seen a little bit of a bounce up as we pointed out. It's up about 15% in my personal portfolio, but it's still trading well below its historic valuation multiples while still having very high levels of projected EPS growth through the year 2030.

So there you go. That's the breakdown particularly of why Bill Ackman added MasterCard to his personal portfolio, but it's clear he sees these same types of advantages across all four of these stocks, Visa, MasterCard, ICE, and S&P Global.