11 Best Stocks You’ll Wish You Bought Sooner

6. Mastercard Incorporated (NYSE:MA)

Price Return Over 3 Years: 52.3%

Return On Equity: 145.9%

Potential Upside: 21.8%

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 136

Mastercard Incorporated (NYSE:MA) is among the best stocks you’ll wish you bought sooner. On December 3, UBS analyst Timothy Chiodo reiterated a Buy rating on Mastercard, with an unchanged price target of $700.00. This reaffirmation came a day after the company presented at the UBS Global Technology and AI Conference 2025.

At the conference, management said that Mastercard (NYSE:MA) continues to demonstrate robust growth momentum, supported by consistently healthy spending trends across both general and affluent consumer segments.

Management also highlighted their expectations of a strong holiday shopping season, with customer spending on Black Friday up approximately 4% year over year. However, they now estimate that net revenue would benefit by roughly 3% in Q4 from favourable foreign exchange rates, lower than their earlier estimates.

According to Mastercard SpendingPulse data (source: investing.com), Black Friday sales were primarily driven by e-commerce, which jumped 10.4% year-over-year, while in-store sales were up 1.7%.

In another development, JPMorgan analyst Tien Tsin Huang published a report on payments and fintech stocks on December 4, mentioning Mastercard Incorporated (NYSE:MA) alongside Visa as the best play on AI-driven agentic commerce. This area of growth was also highlighted by Craig Vosburg, Mastercard’s Chief Services Officer, at the UBS conference. When asked about opportunities for value-added services within an agentic-commerce world, Vosburg said:

“We’re excited about agentic commerce, and we think we have a very important role to play in enabling agentic commerce.” He further stated, “Our starting point on agentic is Mastercard Agent Pay, which is really built around establishing a level of trust and confidence for consumers and businesses alike in a fast-moving world of agentic commerce.”

Headquartered in Purchase, New York, Mastercard Incorporated (NYSE:MA) is an American multinational payment card services company that offers a range of payment transaction processing and other related payment services.