MA vs WDC: Which Is the Better Buy?
Side-by-side comparison of Mastercard Incorporated and Western Digital Corporation — fair value, conviction, valuation metrics, and QuantHub research signals.
Updated 2026-08-06.
Mastercard Incorporated · Financial Services
$543.60
+45.0% upside to fair value
High Conviction
Grade A
High Quality
VS
Western Digital Corporation · Technology
$519.17
-28.7% upside to fair value
Med Conviction
Grade C+
QuantHub Verdict
MA has more upside to fair value
(+45.0%).
These are model outputs — not personalized investment advice.
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Valuation & Fundamentals
| Metric |
MA |
WDC |
| Current Price |
$543.60 |
$519.17 |
| Fair Value Estimate |
$788.22 |
$370.00 |
| Upside to Fair Value |
+45.0%
|
-28.7%
|
| Market Cap |
$480.3B |
$178.9B |
| Forward P/E |
—
|
27.8x
|
| EV / EBITDA |
23.3x
|
37.3x
|
| Price / Sales |
14.2x
|
13.9x
|
| Price / FCF |
27.1x
|
51.0x
|
| Revenue Growth YoY |
+15.8%
|
+35.7%
|
| Gross Margin |
83.0%
|
48.9%
|
| Operating Margin |
59.4%
|
34.9%
|
| Return on Equity |
206.1%
|
43.4%
|
| Dividend Yield |
0.62% |
0.1% |
| FCF Yield |
3.69%
|
2.0%
|
| Analyst Consensus |
Strong Buy
|
Buy
|
Investment Thesis
Mastercard operates a global two-sided payments network that connects issuers, acquirers, merchants and cardholders, monetizing payment volumes and an expanding set of security, data, authentication and other value-added services. Business quality is high: the network benefits from powerful acceptance and scale effects, 83.0% gross margin, 59.4% operating margin, 45.9% net margin, 206.1% ROE, and…
Western Digital is now a pure-play, duopoly hard-disk-drive manufacturer, having spun off its NAND flash business as SanDisk in February 2025 and sold its remaining SanDisk stake for $3.1 billion in February 2026. It is riding the same AI-storage supercycle as SanDisk and Micron, but from the mass-capacity nearline HDD side: hyperscalers are buying every high-capacity drive WDC can make for AI da…
Accumulation Zones
| Metric |
MA |
WDC |
| Zone Low |
$591.16 |
$278.00 |
| Zone High |
$669.99 |
$315.00 |
| In Buy Zone? |
Yes
|
No
|