(This is The Best Stocks in the Market , brought to you by Josh Brown and Sean Russo of Ritholtz Wealth Management.) Josh — I bought some Bitcoin back in 2017. To my knowledge, I was the first CNBC regular to be talking about Coinbase and crypto and all of the new instruments that were being created. If you Google, you can find these clips, I'm too busy right now. Anyway, I bought the coins but I never believed the story. I've held the coins all this time and I still don't believe the story. Why do we need to reinvent a system of payments that already works just fine? Why would merchants and consumers put themselves at risk of market price crashes, hacking, theft, kidnap and ransom when they could just swipe a card (or, these days, hold up a phone)? And then there were the problems of throughput. If you can't do millions of transactions a minute, you don't have a viable payment system for modern times. Well, it turns out that this was the right instinct. It's almost 20 years later and nobody uses crypto for anything besides gambling, political bribery and tricking each other. All the mining operations have pivoted their best GPUs to the data center mania. The crypto influencers who aren't dead or in prison are now wearing suits with American flag lapel pins on their podcasts. And the trading community has mostly lost interest, having discovered zero-day options, 2x levered single-stock ETFs, prediction markets, sports betting and other new methods of speculation. The great irony of the most recent crypto bull market is that it was driven by the advent of ETFs from the largest asset managers in the world, traded on exchanges under the auspices of the securities regulators, endorsed by the sitting President of the United States. The rebellion has been absorbed by the very system it was built to replace. Your revolution's over, Lebowski. The bums lost. The biggest failed crypto prediction other than the "imminent demise of the US dollar" has been this idea that the credit card networks would become obsolete in the presence of lower-cost, more efficient payment rails. "DeFi" was a thing that people used to talk about seriously. Decentralized Finance. The idea was that a crowd of widely distributed people and entities are a better source of validation for transactions than a single entity would be. Sounded great in a white paper but, in reality, people prefer for there to be a central party that can verify the seller has delivered and the buyer is good for the money. It turns out that we don't like "permissionless" or "trustless" or "the code is law." We like centralization. We like instant. We like swiping. We like simplicity. We prefer for someone to sit in the middle of the transaction and to have recourse when something is done incorrectly or inaccurately. In short, the consumer — voting with their actual transacting — prefers the credit card. Especially if it gets them into the airport lounge. Which brings us to Visa (V) , one of the greatest growth stories of all time. I've traded this stock on and off since it came public two decades ago. Mastercard too. I probably should have just held them both forever. If you bought Visa on the IPO — March 19, 2008 — you paid $44 per share. It was the largest U.S. IPO ever at the time, raising $17.9 billion. I know, that sounds adorable now, but back then it was a huge deal. Anyway, there was a 4-for-1 split in March 2015, making the split-adjusted IPO price effectively $11. With the stock at $368 today, that's a gain of roughly 3,250% (33x!) since the offering. A $10,000 investment at the IPO would be worth approximately $335,000 today on a price-return basis, and somewhat more with dividends reinvested. Sacré bleu! Unless you were too busy trading in and out of it like I was. Anyway, Visa has worked since inception and it's working well in 2026. Sean's going to explain why and then we'll take a look at the chart. Best Stock Spotlight: Visa, Inc. (V) Sean — For four years now, market prognosticators have been waiting for the U.S. consumer to crack. Every soft survey print, every uptick in credit card balances, every "the low-end consumer is stretched" take gets recycled as evidence the spending party is ending. If you listen to some earnings reports however, financial CEOs with the clearest view over the most people seem to consistently have a different story. Nobody sees more transactions than Visa. On last week's earnings call, CEO Ryan McInerney opened with 72 billion processed transactions in the quarter, up 10% year over year, reflecting what he called strong and resilient consumer spending. CFO Chris Suh went further down the income spectrum, noting growth improved from the prior quarter across every spend band, from the highest to the lowest, and in his words, "We do not see signs of the lower spend consumer weakening in our volumes." U.S. payments volume grew 10%, a rate management said hasn't been seen since fiscal 2019 outside the post-COVID recovery. So not only are spenders not weakening, they're strengthening their spend! Visa is the toll booth on all of it. The company operates the largest payments network in the world, connecting billions of cards to over 150 million merchant locations and takes a small cut every time money moves across its "rails". Visa reported last week - it was a beat across every key line. Net revenue came in at $11.6 billion, up 14% year-over-year and the fifth consecutive quarter of accelerating growth. Non-GAAP diluted EPS grew 11% to $3.32. Global payments volume crossed $4 trillion in a single quarter for the first time in the company's history, up 10%, with cross-border volume up 12%. The newer growth engines are pulling their weight too - value-added services revenue grew 34% in constant dollars to $3.8 billion, commercial and money movement revenue grew 17% and Visa Direct crossed 4 billion transactions, up 21%. Guidance looked good too. For Q4, management guided net revenue growth to the high end of low double digits, similar to Q3 on an adjusted basis, with EPS growth at the low end of mid-teens. Management even looked ahead to fiscal 2027, saying Visa has a clear line of sight into renewals, the product pipeline and pricing impacts, with formal guidance coming next quarter - all good things for earnings stability (and multiples). Before Josh talks technicals, the stock's path here is worth noting. Visa was 21% off its highs as recently as March, its deepest drawdown since 2022, while the fundamentals above were mostly unchanged. It was all narrative in Q1, sending Visa's forward PE to 22x, its lowest since coming out of the 2022 bear market. Today it trades at a forward 25x earnings, sitting 1% below all time highs. Risk management Josh — V has been putting in higher highs and higher lows since July 1. You're looking at a positive earnings reaction that didn't trigger an overbought signal, a golden cross with the 50-day moving average crossing above the 200-day, and a stock that's seemingly heading toward a date with destiny - approaching the prior highs at $375 for the first time since May 2025. That is the level. Clear it and the path to $400 is wide open. Fail again, and we're going to need some more time to set up. You can't see that high in the technical chart above so take a look at this instead: Now you can see it. This is going to be epic if it breaks through. RSI at 64 is the tell here. The stock absorbed a strong earnings move without getting extended, which means the buyers who came in on the news weren't chasing. That kind of measured momentum after a catalyst tends to follow through. There's still firepower in reserve. Good, we're going to need it for the assault on the old resistance. Traders can use $340 just below the 50-day as their sign to exit. A close below there puts the setup in question. Investors can be more tolerant, leaning on the 200-day at $331. Some of you might be saying, if $375 is the breakout, why not just wait until then before pulling the trigger. I find your lack of faith disturbing. But sure, if you can't handle a failed breakout, you can wait and buy higher with confirmation. Somebody's gotta pay $380, $390. Might as well be you, I guess. 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