SOFI

SoFi had the kind of quarter most companies would celebrate. Revenue grew 40% to a record $1.2 billion, net income hit a record $157 million, and it was the eleventh straight profitable quarter — which matters for a company that spent years losing money. It added 1.1 million new members, the most ever, bringing the total to 15.8 million, up 35%. Loan originations were the best in company history at $14.8 billion. Management raised its revenue forecast for the year. The stock fell about 6% on the news. The reason is a detail that's easy to miss: SoFi raised its revenue guidance but left its profit guidance exactly where it was. In plain terms, they expect to bring in more money than they thought and keep the same amount of it — because they're spending the difference on new products. The CFO said as much directly, that the extra revenue is going toward growth initiatives launched this year that weren't in the original plan. Whether that's smart or not depends entirely on whether those investments work, and you won't know for a while. There was also a soft spot in the numbers: the technology platform business, which sells SoFi's banking software to other companies, saw revenue drop 23%. That was supposed to be a high-margin growth engine. What's actually working is the part SoFi has been promising for years — getting existing customers to buy more products. Half of all new products sold last quarter went to people who were already members, up from about a third a year ago. That's the "everything app" idea finally showing up in the data: someone comes for a student loan refinance, then opens a checking account, then a brokerage account. Each additional product costs SoFi almost nothing to sell and makes the customer harder to lose. If you own this, we'd watch that cross-buy percentage and the fee-based revenue share more than the headline numbers. The stock trades around $18 against a 52-week high near $33, so a lot of enthusiasm has already drained out. Worth knowing: it moves roughly twice as much as the overall market in either direction, so it's not a name to size casually. Next report is in late October. (written with the help of Claude)