Context: One of the ways I make money during the summer is at my summer job, where I oversee a few other employees at a mini golf/driving range/batting cage place. My main job is not to work registers but I do help a little bit on them.
I have been wanting to invest in one of either V or MA but I was unsure which to choose. So today I had the idea to take a tally of every debit/credit card I got to see which type people were using, basically the parking lot test for debit/credit cards. There were purchases today ranging from $8-$300
This was in a 3.5 hour span and wasn’t nearly all the customers that came, just all the customers I was on a register for. I had 54 total tally marks. With the following results,
Visa – 62.9%
Mastercard- 29.6%
AMEX – 7.4%
I was curious what my results looked like compared to the market share I could find online. The market share I found online was
Visa – 61.1%
Mastercard – 25.4%
AMEX – 11.3%
Discover – 2.1%
This was pretty similar to the results I found in my small sample size which I thought was cool.
This lead me to the question, which company should I invest in? MA or V? I originally thought V because they are the most popular card and have the most expensive transactions (not in my data but found on the website I found the market share – statista). But then I thought about MA because of the greater opportunity to increase market share. V would be better if the market grows but MA would be more feasible if the market is stagnant is what I was originally thinking.
I haven’t looked into financials or anything like that yet I was just going off of reasoning and other data so far, but basically the whole point of this long post was to share my experiment and ask if you like V or MA more as a long term investment (I’m 17 so I have 30-50 year window).
