Ackman's Pershing Square Pours $3.3 Billion Into Visa, Mastercard and S&P Global

Bill Ackman just made his biggest new equity bets of the year, and none of them are AI stocks.

Pershing Square's second-quarter 2026 13F filing, covering holdings as of June 29, shows the fund opened three brand-new positions in a single quarter: Visa, Mastercard and S&P Global. Each stake landed at roughly $1.1 billion, according to Yahoo Finance and Crypto Briefing. Combined, that's more than $3 billion parked in financial infrastructure companies Pershing Square had never owned before.

The Visa position alone is 3.27 million shares worth about $1.12 billion, making it roughly 5.4% to 5.76% of the portfolio depending on which filing snapshot you use, per Yahoo Finance and Crypto Briefing. Mastercard came in at 2.12 million shares worth about $1.09 billion. S&P Global rounded out the trio at roughly $1.06 billion to $1.1 billion.

Pershing Square didn't stop there. The same quarter brought new positions in Netflix, Intercontinental Exchange and Alcon, according to International Business Times UK. That's six new stocks in one filing, a portfolio overhaul IBT UK calls one of the biggest shifts in Pershing Square's history.

Why Ackman Says He's Doing This

In Pershing Square Holdings' second-quarter investor letter, published August 19, Ackman's team called Visa and Mastercard "among the highest-quality businesses in the world," according to BigGo Finance. The pitch: both companies run "capital light 'toll-takers'" that collect a fee on every transaction without taking on material risk, and both benefit from inflation because their fees scale with prices.

Ackman is explicitly betting that stock prices follow earnings over time, according to IBT UK. Pershing Square's portfolio reportedly trades at 19 times earnings with 20% expected EPS growth over the next three to five years, versus the S&P 500 at 20 times earnings and 12% growth, per market estimates cited by IBT UK. Those are forward-looking projections, not reported results, and should be read as estimates.

Crypto Briefing reported Ackman pointed to the quarter's market volatility as the actual trigger, framing the buys as opportunistic purchases at attractive prices rather than a defensive retreat. His shareholder letter, released around August 13-14, argued volatility is something to exploit, not fear.

The Visa Numbers Behind the Bet

The timing lines up with a strong earnings report. Visa's fiscal third-quarter 2026 results, released July 28, showed net revenue up 14% year over year to $11.6 billion, according to Yahoo Finance and confirmed by Epoch Times. CEO Ryan McInerney reported quarterly payments volume crossed $4 trillion for the first time in company history, up 10% year over year in constant dollars. Processed transactions grew 10% to $72 billion.

Visa also spent $4.9 billion on buybacks and $1.3 billion on dividends that quarter, per Yahoo Finance. On August 3, Visa announced it will buy Israeli fraud-detection company BioCatch for $2.4 billion in an all-cash deal, according to Epoch Times. BioCatch's behavioral-analytics tools already cover roughly 760 million users across 350 financial institutions. The deal is expected to close by the end of Visa's second fiscal quarter of 2027, a date that hasn't arrived yet.

One Legitimate Worry: Stablecoins

Some investors worry that stablecoins and blockchain-based payment rails could eventually bypass Visa and Mastercard's networks entirely, cutting into the toll-taker model that makes these companies so profitable. IBT UK notes Ackman explicitly addressed this, dismissing concerns that stablecoins could seriously undermine Visa and Mastercard's economics. That's Ackman's argument, not an independently verified fact. Whether card networks can fend off decentralized payment rails over a multi-year horizon remains an open question the market hasn't settled.

Where the Money Is Really Going

Some of this capital deployment likely traces back to Pershing Square USA, the firm's closed-end fund that gave Ackman additional dry powder for equity purchases, according to Crypto Briefing. That's a mechanical detail, not spin, but it matters. This isn't just Ackman reshuffling an existing pot of money. Fresh capital is chasing these bets.

Separately, and unrelated to the fund's trading strategy, Ackman disclosed in an SEC filing that he transferred 10 million shares of Pershing Square worth roughly $400 million to a new medical research nonprofit, the Ackman Oxman Institute, following his daughter Lucy's brain hemorrhage in February, according to the Daily Wire. That's a personal charitable gift from Ackman's own holdings, not a Pershing Square Capital Management investment decision, and it has no bearing on the fund's payments-sector bet.

Pershing Square's next 13F filing, covering the third quarter of 2026, will show whether Ackman held, added to, or trimmed these positions once Visa's BioCatch acquisition closes and stablecoin adoption trends become clearer.