5 Best Long-Term Stocks To Buy Now

2. Mastercard Incorporated (NYSE:MA)

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 156      

Mastercard Incorporated (NYSE:MA) recently announced that it would be accelerating a self-imposed timeline for net zero carbon emissions at the firm to 2040 from 2050, using the Sustainability Innovation Lab of the firm to offer customers new digital tools. The payments company has also been positioning itself for the coming years with careful investments in blockchain and crypto. It recently announced that any company that uses the payment network of the firm would soon be able to trade in crypto. 

In addition to a vision for the long-term growth of the firm, Mastercard Incorporated (NYSE:MA) also had solid fundamentals. It recently beat market estimates on earnings per share and revenue for the third quarter by $0.18 and $50 million respectively. 

Among the hedge funds being tracked by Insider Monkey, Virginia-based investment firm Akre Capital Management is a leading shareholder in Mastercard Incorporated (NYSE:MA) with 5.8 million shares worth more than $2.1 billion. 

In its Q4 2020 investor letter, Bretton Fund, an asset management firm, highlighted a few stocks and Mastercard Incorporated (NYSE:MA) was one of them. Here is what the fund said:

“While consumers resumed much of their spending by summer, what and how they used their Visas and Mastercards changed. For obvious reasons, people shifted to contactless payments—one of the Covid-era changes we think is permanent—and replaced travel purchases with online shopping and food delivery. Consumers spent more on their debit cards and less on their credit cards; Visa and Mastercard make more per transaction on the latter. They also make more on cross-border transactions that come mostly from international travel, which ground to a halt early in the pandemic. Visa’s and Mastercard’s earnings per share fell by 7% and 16%, respectively, compared to their usual mid-teens growth. We’re not too worried, and we think they’ll catch up nicely in the post-vaccine world. Visa’s stock returned 17.1% and Mastercard’s 20.2%.”