American Express
AXP on NYSE. American Express sells payment cards, banking, and merchant services to consumers and businesses. Market value $219.3bn.
Ranked 638 of 1,305 on tonight’s list. On the list every night since 3 August 2026.
For every $100 of what the whole company costs, it produced $7.30 of spare cash last year. A savings account pays about 4.
You pay 96.8 years of operating profit for the business. The average large US company costs around 18.
Not meaningful for banks and insurers, whose profit is not measured this way.
Five years of cash, in billions
| Revenue | $28.4bn | $24.5bn | $27.8bn |
| Operating margin | 12.6% | 11.6% | n/a |
| Debt to equity | 5.07 | 6.12 | 3.53 |
| Shares outstanding | n/a | n/a | 1.20bn |
Health checks
- Free cash flow positive5 of 5 years
- Accounting checksNot applicable to banks
- Debt1.68× equity
- Revenue growth, five yearsShrinking, 1.0% a year
Dates
Funds that own it
| Manager | Value | Change |
|---|---|---|
| Berkshire Hathaway | $51.3bn | Held |
| First Eagle Investment | $568m | Held |
| Smead Capital | $192m | Cut 6% |
| Markel Group | $166m | Held |
| GAMCO Investors | $132m | Held |
| Dodge & Cox | $92m | Cut 2% |
| Davis Selected Advisers | $71m | Cut 10% |
| Harris Associates | $69m | Held |
| GMO Asset Management | $30m | Added 75% |
| Tweedy Browne | $21m | Held |
| Giverny Capital | $16m | New position |
| Bridgewater Associates | $10m | Added 36% |
| Gotham Asset Management | $8m | Held |
| Lindsell Train | $3m | Cut 16% |
| Gardner Russo & Quinn | $2m | Cut 21% |
| Semper Augustus | $1m | Cut 4% |
| Ruane Cunniff & Goldfarb | $315,249 | Held |
From 13F filings for the quarter ending 30 June 2026. These are reported 45 days late and only show long positions.
Insiders
We do not track insider filings for this company yet.
What could go wrong
Cheap for a reason is the question the numbers cannot answer. Whether the price already reflects the risks is what the deep dive is for.
The deep dive
Everything above is arithmetic on public filings. The deep dive reads the last ten years of annual reports, the proxy statements, and the earnings calls, then argues the case the way Buffett, Klarman, and Hohn would, and checks every claim against the source.
- What the business is worth, as a range, and the margin of safety at today’s price
- Prices to start buying, buy, and buy hard
- The three things that would make this a mistake
- Every number footnoted to the filing it came from
Your first deep dive is free.
Not advice. Numbers on this page come from SEC filings and are updated each night; the five-year figures are rounded.