This is a guest post from John Smith. He blogs about long term investment options. He talked about identifying moats of the economy to invest for long term, in his previous guest post. Enjoy another thought-provoking post!
Earlier, we discussed moats, and how to identify them. Throughout the article, I used Visa (NYSE:V) and MasterCard (NYSE:MA) as examples of moats. In this article, we will discuss why they are fit for a long-term investor, and find Visa and MasterCard’s moats (along with the moats of railroads).
Before examining the moats of the two companies, we must first understand their business. According to the Yahoo Finance business summary of Visa, “The company facilitates commerce through the transfer of value and information among financial institutions, merchants, consumers, businesses, and government entities.” (MasterCard’s description is practically the same).