Visa Inc., the world's largest credit-card company, said profit rose 41 percent on gains from U.S. debit-card purchases and faster growth overseas.

Visa will be releasing its Q3 '08 earnings today. We've posted an options trade on the Navivest Stocks and Options blog, that will enable traders to profit from the earnings news, regardless of whether its good or bad.

An article on some of the potentially hot IPOs of 2008 following Visa. If these IPOs do as well as Visa did this year, we potentially have a nice profit opportunity.
The website features a portfolio of an individual who does not have much of an investing background venturing into the investing world with his first $10,000, and you get to track his progress every step of the way.

Now that both credit card behemoths have issued earnings results (Visa for the first time as a public company) I thought it would be interesting to compare the results from each side by side.

V closed @ 56.5

The market cap for this company is now over $25 billion, about the same market cap as Mastercard. It certainly has more upside because it is bigger than MA.

"Shares of Visa Inc. leaped more than 35% in their market debut Wednesday, opening at $59.50 as investor demand for the largest initial public offering in U.S. history drew spirited bidding. It took about 45 minutes to align buyers and sellers before the share finally opened Wednesday, as demand surged amid renewed interest this week in financial shares."

According to TodaysFinancialNews.com: "You have a number of options to profit from Thursday’s Visa IPO. First, you could simply try to buy shares in the aftermarket. In a best-case scenario, you would buy at or near the issue price and watch your shares go up followeing the same trajectory as MasterCard or, even better, Google. But there are two more ways to profit…"

It has been awhile since we have heard anything about the Visa IPO. In the Wall Street Journal this morning, there was an article about credit-card processing giant Visa. Visa plans to sell as much as $17 billion in stock, which would make it the biggest IPO in U.S. history.