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Strategies & Market Trends : Value Investing -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Harshu Vyas who wrote (78935)	1/12/2026 3:56:23 PM
From: E_K_S	1 Recommendation Recommended By S. maltophilia Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 79163

Do you think the "Buy Now" & "Pay Later" customer is of the highest quality? Not sure I want to play in that sandbox even if companies like PYPL have sold all those loans. I continue to buy Jr Silver miners and SLV betting that the metal price is undervalued by as much as 100% when looking out 2-3 years. These are assets I would rather hold than 'sour' loans to dead beat customers that live pay-check-to-pay-check and have little to no way to pay back their loans.

To: Harshu Vyas who wrote (78935)	1/13/2026 4:35:19 AM
From: petal	1 Recommendation Recommended By Harshu Vyas Respond to of 79163

Been thinking about the payments industry itself. Think it's a race to the bottom business. Volumes will rise but margins (on each transaction) will be competed away. Why would that be? Visa and MasterCard have had a duopoly on cards for many decades. (Or a triopoly, if you count American Express in.) Competition has been around for decades, digitally too. Apple Pay, Google Pay etc has been around for a decade. Margins on transactions seems to have been steady on the whole. I'm not sure why that would change all of a sudden? When it comes to digital payments, it's a different story. But PayPal and others still seem to thrive. But it's not an industry I want to be in. I'd rather buy a business that can increase prices on consumers, not the reverse. This is a bit off-topic, and a philosophical tangent: but I'm not sure that I would. Seems to me that the nicer thing to do is to lower the price for your customers, not raise them. People/companies who do that seems to get richly rewarded too. (Costco, Walmart, Amazon, Standard Oil, Carnegie, Henry Ford, etc. etc.) I prefer a company that has deliberately low margins to one with deliberately high ones. The former enters into a long-term partnership with their customers, the latter tries to maximize the value capture for themselves in an ultimately short-sighted way. (In the long run, the interest of customers and shareholders is one and the same.)