Oh, hey quick note: i just put one and a half million dollars into the stock market in stocks and options and if you don't know exactly what trades i'm making check out the stocks and psychology and money group linked down below you get lifetime access. Price goes up over time, no reason not to join and there's a coupon code linked down below that's expiring, soon, birthday's coming up, hey everyone, we kevin here, we've got to talk about a sofa. What is the story about sofi? Getting this a bank charter approval? What's going on with mergers, why is the stock up yesterday and again, another 18 today, at least at the time of this recording? This is a stock that, over the last couple days, has gone from 12 to now 16, and the question is: is this potentially just the beginning? I mean, after all, if you look at the chart here, we've really only just today crossed above our low support level. Here very rarely do we fall below this level here, and it tends to be a buying opportunity buying opportunity here now we're above that level.

That's just a little bit of ta. Let's talk fundamentals, though, because that's what this video is about fundamentals? How high can this go? Let's talk about it, keep in mind. This video is brought to you by the programs on building your wealth. If you join the stocks in psychology and money group, you get all of my buy trade alerts so that way, if you want to know what kind of option trades i placed on sofi, you can learn about those i'll link down below now.

Full transparency for this video - i do have exposure to about a million dollars of sofi stock, but i'm going to say things that are both bullish and bearish, and i don't want you to misconstrue at all that i'm not invested in this stock. I am invested in this stock, so we'll make that very clear. Okay. So what is sofi and what do they do well simply put their.

They started out as a lending company student loans and they've kind of expanded from there. They expanded from student loans to personal loans, to home loans, to credit card loans and to even commercial loans like small business loans, and so they make a lot of interest income. In fact, about 50 of their revenue comes from interest over 73 percent of their net revenue, which is their version of gross profit, comes from interest. So they make a lot of money from interest, and this is one of the things that has a lot of folks excited about the idea that hey wait a minute if we're potentially going into a an interest rate rising environment.

Maybe we need exposure to banks. Well guess who just became a bank so far and guess who potentially could benefit from higher spreads in interest rates? So far? Now, there's always the question that but wait a minute if you're a lender. One of the ways that you make money is through the origination and through the sale of loans, usually don't make money from servicing sofa does service loans, but they usually lose money on this uh and so fi also has a technology platform. This is where they sort of encompass their stock brokerage as well.

Where you can buy crypto, you could buy stocks things like that. They also have referral fee based systems where, just as an example, if you want to sign up with life insurance, try this go to metkevin.com life and then compare that landing page that you go to to the landing page. That sofi has, when you try to sign up with life insurance. It's the same.

It's because we that is me separately from sofi have a partnership with ladder life. We get a little squeeze page, you go to it, you sign up, it's the same life insurance. I have i get a thank you bonus for you doing that sofi does as well, so we're actually using a very similar way to make money in that sense, but these are all smaller portions of their revenue, their referrals, their technology platforms. This is less than about 20 of their revenue right, but, more importantly, going back to the the loan origination.

A lot of folks are excited about the fact that wait a minute if sofi is a bank and most of their money comes from interest. What if they can cut out the middle person that is using another bank to fund these accounts to come up with the money to borrow the money if they can cut out a bank and they can now lower their cost of capital? By being a bank, then they're going to increase their margin and potentially make more money. This is big news and that's exactly what this is big news, but i do want to also just give a quick shout out before we go into more of this banking news. Uh to the fact that they acquired galileo financial, this is a company that actually provides virtual credit cards, physical credit cards and payment processing apis to different platforms and sofi owns this sofite does a lot.

Yesterday. We probably spent together about, i would say, maybe somewhere around 25 man, hours or human hours, reviewing, sulfi and and coming up with the the fundamental analysis that we're reviewing here. But in doing so, it was really mind-blowing was just how deep sofi really is invested in the uh. The fintech space see one of the things that's wild is that within this 20 revenue section, they have so many different ways of trying to attract people to their business, and that is a critical and we'll talk more about numbers regarding that in just a moment.

But that's critical: they want every way for you to potentially come to sofi to be an option, that's open, and so they have a robo advising business, but not only do they have a robo advising business where they are a licensed and registered investment advisor. For that. That's sofi wealth llc all under the sofa umbrella, but they also have a financial planning service. It's sofi capital advisors, llc, another registered investment advisor all under the sofa umbrella, and here you can literally set up a free financial planning, consult consultation, call with a professional at sofi.

Now that that is mind-blowing to me, because i'm like part of me, is actually a little bit concerned because i'm like how how are y'all trying to make money here, i don't get it. How could you give away free financial planning like this, but then it makes sense so far spends a lot of money on acquiring customers, and so their cost of acquiring a customer is somewhere around eight hundred dollars. Well, the expected lifetime value of a customer at sofa is about sixteen hundred dollars, so, in other words, they're putting eight hundred dollars on the table. Now, with the goal of doubling that over the time that you are a lifetime customer at so far, okay makes sense.

Put 800 in get 1600 back. Hopefully you could do that within five to 10 years and you got a pretty nice rate of return, especially if you can decrease that cost capital or cost of customer acquisition from 800 to 400. Well, now things start getting fun. Now you get to like forex right, and so, if you can attract somebody through, let's say the financial planning business and then get them into a home loan or into a personal loan or into a credit card consolidation loan or into their stock brokerage and then eventually Into the loans well, gosh now you've got a customer for life as long as you don't well, piss them off uh, and so not only do they have this investment advisor business, which is incredible, but then i realized that they also have five uh at least five Free etfs now these are just uh, baskets kind of like what you could set up on, like m1 finance or whatever, but they are actual exchange traded funds which bestow certain tax benefits.

Talk to your cpa about that and using these and potentially trading in these, i i don't believe that these are actively managed. It's not like these are kathy wood style. Etfs remember over uh at uh, kathy wood uh at her ets like arc you're, usually paying somewhere around eight uh 80 basis points in fees to invest in an etf. So that would mean, if you have a hundred dollars, invested you're paying about 80 cents per year.

As a fee for that etf - and it makes sense because etfs cost a lot of money to establish - i mean you could be spending or an etf company. Uh probably has a break-even cost on an etf of managing somewhere around 50 million dollars with uh with an 80 basis point fee, and so the fact that so far is providing five different ones with no fee at all is kind of interesting. Now i don't know much about the contents of them and whether they're actively managed or not, i highly doubt they are actively managed, but i imagine they make some sort of modifications to them over time, depending on on whatever they feel uh anyway. Those are things that you could explore if you wanted to download the sofi app, i'm not sponsored by sofi.

I do again want to be very transparent, i'm an investor and so far uh, i'm not a personal user of sofi uh, which i probably should be, and i am not sponsored by so fun. I have been in the past, though uh, but not right. Now. Okay, now, let's talk a little bit about the banking aspect of sofi and some background information, because there's some misinformation related to this in terms of how much capital a sofa is going to have to spend to get all this set up and going and - and is This potentially going to constrain this growth over at so far.

So, let's clear this up now, golden pacific bank was acquired by sofi uh on march 12th, 2021 for 2.55 cents per share, which worked out to about 22.3 million dollars so in other words, so far spent 22.3 million dollars to buy a bank which is actually not That much money to get a company, essentially that has a banking license. Now it still took 10 months, though, for a regulator to say we're. Okay with this merger, and that's how sofi is actually getting their banking license, see they're not going from scratch, trying to get a banking license, they're acquiring a bank merging with this and then applying through, essentially a streamlined process of of getting a banking license. This is very, very common.

Banking charters are probably the most difficult thing that you could try to get done in america, but there are some benefits of this. For example, if you are a licensed lender, you usually have to be licensed in all 50 states and that that's a regulatory burden. Now, if this is a substantial burden for uh, there's no consistency, usually between states, it's a massive burden for companies to manage uh. Now, when you're a bank you're managed by uh fdic the fed and the sec, so you're really going from 50 state governments and the sec once you're, past 15 states down to three regulatory bodies.

So it's still kind of insane that you have three regulatory bodies. But it's a lot better uh, and so so, if i bought this bank and they are merging with golden pacific bank, that's how they're getting the charter they're going to be renamed sofi bank. The operating agreement does say that the resulting banks shall not engage in any crypto asset activities or services currently performed by sofi. But it's important to separate these as sort of uh the the umbrella that uh that you should kind of picture for this.

So it gets a little confusing, but i think it's made very simple by this. If we just say here's sofi uh ink, then if this is sort of the the holding company, then sofa has many different aspects underneath it right. Remember, we've got those two different uh registered investment advisors. The two different versions of that you've got like the robo advisor and then you've got uh the financial planning section and then you've got like the technology platform over here which could be like sofi crypto.

I'm not exactly sure if they call it sofa, crypto, but whatever wherever they offer the crypto and stock services whatever this is, which they use apex to perform these services, which is just an intermediary that actually fulfills the trades for you, it's worth noting that companies uh Well, robin hood used to use apex back in 2016., uh weeble and m1 finance and many many many other companies use apex payment for order flow. All the kind of classic stuff you would expect is over here uh, so so, if it does use payment for order flow, and then you have sulfite bank, so sofi banks over here, and so when you see no uh crypto is allowed. That's that's over here at the bank portion uh, it's okay for crypto to continue here at least that's my understanding, uh and and reading of uh documentation about. What's going on here so uh, then we've got uh this so so now you've got a little bit of background on how this works and why the streamlining helps and now numbers wise.

It's useful to consider what barron says. Baron says that we can expect 200 to 300 million dollars in additional annual adjusted ebitda because of lowering costs of capital. That's huge and i'll show you where those numbers you know sometimes just saying these numbers doesn't make much sense. I'll show you in a spreadsheet where this becomes a lot more relevant, but that's huge.

So this banking charter is a huge competitive advantage and it's something that sofa is extremely happy about, and investors should be very happy about as well. Investors should be cheering this and we'll talk values as well now, as far as the company itself and user growth. It's worth mentioning that in september of 2019, the company had about 750 000 users, a year later by september 30th of 2020, they had 1.5 million users and, as of 2021 september 30th, we're at 2.937 million. So you've almost got a double a double and a double which is pretty incredible.

Now they also cross sell about 70 of their products, which is huge again remember. It lowers that cost of acquisition for customers and they're really trying to bump this by making sure that they can offer pretty much every single service that somebody would need in the financial space, whether again, that's stocks or crypto, or financial planning or home loans or refinances Or credit cards, or whatever they're, trying to touch everything now that their bank is well when interest rates go up, i expect that sofa is probably going to get a little bit competitive with a high yield savings as well, but speaking about competition. It's important to remember that there is a lot of competition uh. Consider this you've got jp morgan reporting a significant drop last quarter in this quarter in credit card income.

Uh, which isn't good and jp morgan, is ramping up their marketing for credit cards. So you're going to have competition in that credit card space which, if somebody goes to jpm instead of sofi, that's potentially a client that is now getting their home loan through jpm instead of sofi or their student loan refinance right. We also don't expect, according to jp morgan, that deposits are going to grow substantially in 2022, but that, right now we are seeing higher balances in folks accounts than usual, which is good so far has recognized this as well, and the goal is for more people to Have more money at so far? That's the ultimate goal. However, jp morgan does caution us that we're actually likely to see a decline in margins for mortgages going into 2022 and that's probably because the mortgage industry is extremely competitive.

This is one of the reasons you've seen the united wholesale mortgage and rocket mortgage not do that well in terms of their stock price. These are extremely competitive lenders and they make it very very hard for companies to gather what are known as spreads, and this is where, if let's say, you're, borrowing the money at uh 2.5, but you're lending it out at 3.5 on a 30-year mortgage and then generally You're securitizing these and selling these loans off anyway, but that spread gets squeezed when you have clients who are able to shop. The best kind of client for a company is a client that comes in through like a student loan, and then they do their stocks at so far or whatever, and then they're like oh yeah. I need a mortgage too, and they don't even shop.

They just can't have a mortgage right. This is one of the benefits of always shopping when you're, when you're looking for a mortgage, uh or even using potentially a loan broker. Who can do that shopping for you now worth also noting from some of the other banks here that uh morgan, stanley, uh and uh city, as well as wells fargo, have all mentioned that uh trading revenues have declined in the last quarters, and that is still a Portion of sofi's revenues it's about 18, so we're going to see some headwinds in trading and that's literally what so far said in their last earnings, call that they expect headwinds in the trading segment. And this is reiterated by what's going on at the other banks, which is so weird to say that now, but you can now say the other banks because so far is now a bank uh.

We do have an increased what's being called by morgan stanley, uh in terms of a war on talent or war 4 talent. This basically means companies are having to pay substantially more for talent. So if sofi wants more financial planners, they're, potentially going to have to pay more for those experts and that's likely going to increase their cost of doing business, which isn't the most ideal but is ultimately something that is part of the environment that we're in right now. Uh we are seeing at wells fargo default rates at uh, and this was reiterated by many different banks, but wells fargo, i think said it best.

They said that payment rates are extremely high and default rates are extremely low. Right now on credit cards. They say that, regarding savings, consumers have 30 to 35 percent more on deposit than they did pre-covered. However, they too are launching new credit cards, including a two percent cash back on everything card, with no limits uh and no need to call to sign up for a category.

That's a slam on chase right. There. Bank of america also sees small business lending running consistently. Above pre-pandemic levels and every loan category is expanding, except for home equity.

Now that is actually bullish for bank of a or for sofi uh, and really just the lending industry in general bank of america is saying: wow we're seeing small business lending pick up lending pickup in consumer loans and credit cards and student loans. Then that's bullish for sofi right and again so we're seeing headwinds and trading and probably margins getting squeezed at the mortgage segment, but in the other lending sectors it and wages going up right, but in the other lending sectors we're seeing positive news and a positive growth. Now you do have competition as well from a company like upstart upstart offers loans on their website and they basically are a cloud-based, artificial intelligence lending platform and they're kind of like an ai broker is the best way i try to describe upstart now, i'm not an Investor in upstart, but basically they have software that make it very easy for bank partners to get loans done through uh through upstart. That is a form of competition uh from for sofi.

So you got ta watch upstart as well as a competitor, and it's going to be one of the comps that we use for trying to value sofa as well uh. They also get platform and referral fees that are either a fixed amount or a percentage based on the volume of these loans originated. This makes sense, it's kind of like a commission for doing loans again that makes them a competitor to sofi. Now, uh, it's presumed that a lot of their loans are sold pretty much once they are originated.

So if we do see more competition here or declining fees, that is going to be a risk for a company like sofi and upstart, because originations and selling loans is a way to make money and again so if it makes a ton of money from lending the Vast majority of their lending over 70 percent of uh, their their net revenue, comes from lending okay. So now, let's talk about uh, the the actual cost of goods sold here, which is the cost of their services. The biggest problem that i think so far has - and this is something that i think is critical for paying attention to - is decreasing the cost of acquiring customers. If, for some reason, it becomes substantially more expensive to acquire customers like let's say, sofi has to brand a stadium to start acquiring customers to me, that seems a little excessive and expensive, and that's literally what sofi did the stable center is now the sofa stadium, which Is mind-blowing that a company with about a 12 or 13 billion dollar market cap spent over 400 million dollars on a stadium? Now, in fairness, when they made the deal, the company was worth a little bit more.

The stock has come down a little bit from some of its euphoric highs, but uh, it still seems a little wild. So i do have concerns over the amount of advertising spend so far also does a lot of a partnering with digital influencers, which personally, this might be a little biased to say, but i think it's actually a really good idea. I think partnering with digital influencers is the best kind of advertising like, and i always want to be transparent with you when i'm sponsored, i'm not sponsored by so far in this video again. I do understand, though, but for example, what would you, what do we care about? More uh, you know a tv commercial, oh sign up, you know and make sure to call now call sofi now 1-800-355-3500 right like that or somebody giving you a deep dive about a product and then being transparent about being sponsored by uh by the company.

Right again, this video is not sponsored by so far but uh. I haven't sponsored by them in the past, so i think they're, a great company now uh okay, so that is a segment to watch when it comes to sofi. Is their marketing spend because their margins right now suck and that's because they're well, the reality is they are an unprofitable business right now? Okay, so let's take a look at one of the templates that i like to use for stock analysis. Uh.

I've got a few of these one for unprofitable companies, one for profitable companies and uh. It probably took me somewhere around myself around 30 hours, to put this together. It's not perfected yet, but i'm still working on it and i think the more companies i analyze with this, the better it'll get. But now this here is a spreadsheet that i put together on sofi and if we hop on over to the a conclusion of the spreadsheet, we're going to get a few different ways of valuing this company again, it's not profitable right now, we do expect to be Profitable in the future by 2025, and if we use about a 66.9 times multiple in 2025, i do believe that a fair value for sofi would be about 32.56, which, at the time i put the spreadsheet together.

That was so. If i was trading for about 1371., i can jump over here and we can modify this just so we can get the compounded rate of return. Let's do that here. So, let's go in here and edit this sheet here and let's take sofi's price, which right now is yesterday's price.

Let's just delete that and manually throw in 16.36 here for the price, and so if sofi does end up running to about 32.56 cents by 2025, then that's an 18.7 compounded annual rate of return. It's a double 18.78! That's not bad! I do have a second metric that i like to use and it's price per sale or price to sales ratio, it's basically market cap, uh and uh, and then revenue weighted and uh in this case it's the result that i got was a little less bullish. I got to about 27.63 and i always like to look at both of these numbers and make sure that i'm comfortable with both of these rates of return, because, first of all, i like to be conservative with my analysis, but second of all uh. It's it's always important to know that you could have price to earnings compression or you could have price to sales compression or you could have compression in both, and so i always like using different metrics, especially for unprofitable companies.

It's a little bit more difficult. These are the comps that i used so uh, obviously sofi is is one of its own comps. So, for in terms of price to sales, you would use so far as one of its own comps square paypal, nerd, wallet, upstart, that's where i got to about an eight in terms of average price to sale or median price to sale. Here, rather i didn't use average, because the nerd wallet has nerd wallet and square are a little skewed in price to sale right now, and they would weight this price to sales down substantially.

So i'm using a median to get a little bit more of a true middle here i and then i also compress this by about 10, so i'm only using 7.2 as the price to sales in the future for 2025. and then the uh current average price to Earnings ratios that we have uh between square paypal, nerd wallet, upstart is about 94. and because nerdwallet it has an infinite pe. I actually used 100 just to to make sure this.

This wasn't too ridiculous of a weight, and then i took 30 percent off for multiple compression in the future, bringing me to about that 66.93. So that gives you a little bit of an idea in terms of how that worked. But this is worth looking at over here. This is where we're going to change a little bit of information, so this right here in yellow the top line here in yellow is information from the average wall street estimates right now and i'm going to modify this a little bit because i believe that we're going To have a little bit of a higher margin than what wall street is currently expecting, and so what the reason i say that is because i don't believe that wall street has priced in yet the margin improvement that having a banking license is going to give.

So far, so i'm going to go over here and i'm going to take about 10 off of the operating expenses. That should give me about 300 million dollars of more bottom line money. So if we had taxable income here of 515 million, if i drop this to 25 in 2025, once i have their bank up and running - and everything that gives me about 300 million more here brings me to about 859 million in taxable income and it now because The spreadsheet updates, as i make it we jump over here, we can actually see that so far could potentially run as high as 54 dollars by 2025. If these margins improve this much now i like to be conservative so uh, even though 54 dollars is really cool.

Uh some people, you know, can can pull price targets out of thin air and say things especially when a stock is running or going up. People like to say: oh, it's it's going to 100, it's going about it! Fine that may happen, but ultimately, things tend to rubber band back to fundamentals. 54 is possible. That's more than a 3x on this stock.

Again, i'm going to be conservative, but i'm showing you that the original numbers that we used here taking off or not, including that additional marginal improvement there. The additional numbers there easily, in my opinion, bring us to 32 to 27 already with compressed multiples and compressed price. To sales ratios so to me, that's that's very, very exciting and something that i'm relatively bullish on so we'll see. The big issue for sofi, though, is going to be maintaining growth and so far they've been doubling every year.

I don't expect that double to continue. That's 100 growth, so right now i've actually only got 47 here for 2022 42 for 23, 20 about 30 for 2024 and 25 for 2025.. Now that that could end up being a realistic growth curve for sofi or they could miss substantially, maybe their advertising falls flat and doesn't work as well. So there are real risk factors here.

It is not a profitable company. Today, uh you, you can't do a discounted cash flow on this company right now, unless you really want it to project out to 2030, which i don't like to project out more than four years. I already think projecting out to 2025 is generous and i don't think they're going to be profitable until 2025, maybe 2024. Actually, i do have my 2024 being profitable, so there are a lot of things for you to weigh here now.

I do want to also mention that there was a seeking alpha article, where somebody mentioned that sofa is going to have to contribute 750 million dollars in capital to golden pacific bank, and they kind of implied that this was an expense that so far was going to Have to spend this money uh to to essentially acquire the banks - 750 million dollars. I think they missed the fact that so far already acquired this bank for 22.3 million dollars in march uh, and this 750 million dollars is really just the capital they're parking over there. So it's kind of like moving cash from one part of sofi to the other, so i i i'm not too worried about the capitalization of sofi, like this individual was in in this seeking alpha review now regarding cash, they have right now. They've got current assets of about 854 million dollars and i could see that if you're like well, they got 854 million.

They got to move 750. Oh my gosh, like you're, not gon na, have much cash left, but again this this is part of their operations. Remember they make most of their money from lending. So the fact that they're moving money over there is again just moving money around uh.

They do have current liabilities of 552 million dollars so more more current assets than current liabilities, and then they've got some debt. Okay, they've got 5.5 billion dollars of debt, so uh longer-term debt is something to pay attention to here as well part of this longer-term debt. Is there their the crazy amount of spending that they do for advertising? Okay, uh. You know i mentioned earlier.

I think the digital influencer spend is great, but if it gets out of hand - and they, they have lower rates of return on their partnerships with digital influencers or things like branding with with the sofi stadium, then i do think that there are substantial risks for sofi And if they do start pairing back their marketing spend, then they might not grow as much as they're expected. If their marketing is less less effective, then they might have to spend more money and grow less than than expected. So there are a lot of assumptions when you're investing in a fintech company and fintechs have been getting wrecked in the stock market lately, so a lot of risks yeah. I do think that the downside generally for sofi is around 14 and 80 cents, and this is this is more technically based than it is fundamentally based, and it's really solely because looking at the chart, you see this thick blue line right here.

It's pretty evident that when you're buying it under 1480, in my opinion, you're getting a relative bargain on it, uh now no guarantees. That's like i said it's a relative bargain, which does not necessarily have to mean bargain. You go into a recession. The last thing you probably want your investments in are companies that are exposed to loans that could substantially default.

But again when we listen to what the other banks are saying, that doesn't seem to be as big of an issue. So, look, i'm optimistic if you want to know exactly what kind of trades i'm making and everything that i'm doing when it comes to investing, make sure to check out the programs on building your wealth, a link down below stocks and psychology. Money group comes with a buy, sell alerts. There is a coupon code that does expire on my birthday, which is now in what is it uh eight days, so i'm super excited about that anyway.

Hopefully, you found this helpful. If you did consider sharing this. Thank you. So much for watching this, video and folks we'll see in the next one thanks.