Whilst SoFi continues to attract attention, a discerning mind might reasonably inquire whether there exist other opportunities, businesses of a similar character, yet offered at a more equitable price. To secure a substantial return without incurring undue risk is, after all, the very essence of prudent investment.
Here’s a little table. Numbers are supposed to mean something, but mostly they just are.
Most folks think of Amazon and see boxes and deliveries. But underneath all that cardboard, there’s something rather clever going on. Something to do with clouds… not the fluffy white kind, but the sort you store information on. And this cloud business, see, it’s absolutely vital for all this new-fangled ‘Artificial Intelligence’ everyone’s chattering about.
Claude Cowork, with its industry-specific plugins, spooked the SaaS crowd – Salesforce, Intuit, Atlassian. Investors figured, why pay a fortune for streamlining when a machine might do it for peanuts? A reasonable fear, in a world obsessed with cutting corners. But the sell-off spread, snagging a name that didn’t quite fit. Alphabet. Google. A 6% drop. A slight cough for a giant, but a cough nonetheless.
The SMB, as I understand it, deals in municipal bonds—essentially, loans to cities and towns. Think school construction, sewer repairs, things that require a lot of paperwork and disgruntled taxpayers. The IGSB, on the other hand, is all about corporate bonds—loans to companies, the kind that might lay you off with a polite email and a severance package just large enough to cover your cat’s vet bills. The difference, as far as I can tell, is one is marginally less likely to leave you staring into the abyss, and the other offers a slightly better return. A trade-off, really. Like choosing between a lukewarm cup of tea and a slightly chipped mug.
To speak of ‘cheapness’ in relation to these entities feels… discordant. A misnomer, perhaps. Yet, the valuations, once soaring into the stratosphere, have begun to… settle. Not to a level of genuine affordability, understand, but to a point where a dispassionate assessment, stripped of the prevailing narrative of endless growth, becomes… permissible. We must, therefore, undertake a meticulous examination, a sifting of the numbers, to discern whether a flicker of opportunity exists within this seemingly impenetrable fortress of capital.
Consensus estimates project fourth-quarter earnings per share of approximately $1.35 on revenue of $2.87 billion, figures aligning with prior management guidance. While these metrics suggest modest, single-digit growth in both revenue and gross merchandise volume (GMV), they demonstrate continued operational momentum, even amidst macroeconomic uncertainties.
Both charge a perfectly reasonable, if ultimately futile, fee. The one-year performance is, shall we say, disheartening. HODL’s smaller size might be a consideration for those who prefer a more… intimate relationship with their losses.
The past three years, of course, have been… generous to those who held faith in the company. A surge, a veritable flood of capital, poured into the building of data centers, vast cathedrals dedicated to the worship of artificial intelligence. The processors, the very heart of these digital deities, sold like blessings in a time of drought. Sevenfold returns, they say, though Mateo always suspected the true measure of wealth wasn’t in the numbers themselves, but in the stories they concealed.
A snapshot, if you will, of their comparative virtues and, shall we say, limitations: