Right now my portfolio is split 71% stocks and 29% derivatives, and if I’m being honest, that options allocation is a little higher than I’d normally like. I generally try to keep leveraged exposure on a shorter leash. But I feel genuinely good about where I am. Most of these positions were entered at very favorable times, which means my strikes are sitting well below where the underlying stocks are trading now, and a few of these spreads are already sitting in the money before I’ve even gotten to the good part of the move. So while the number looks aggressive on paper, the risk profile underneath it feels a lot more conservative than a straight 29% number suggests.

Here’s the full breakdown: shares first, then a quick primer on what I’m actually doing with these options, then the positions themselves with the reasoning behind each strike, and finally where I’m looking to add.

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I do not write about every stock on my watchlist. But when a company checks as many boxes as Nokia does right now, I feel like I owe it to this community to put it on your radar. Nokia is not a flashy name. It does not have the hype cycle that surrounds the Nvidias and the Palantirs of the world. Most people still think of it as the company that made indestructible brick phones in the early 2000s. But that version of Nokia has not existed for a long time, and the version that exists today is quietly positioning itself at the center of one of the most important buildouts in modern technology history.

Here is what caught my attention: the stock is currently sitting in the $11 range after pulling back significantly from its highs. Meanwhile, insiders were loading up shares in the $15 to $16 range earlier this year. When the people running a company are buying stock at prices higher than where it is currently trading, that tells me the market has handed us a better entry point than the people closest to the business thought they were getting. That asymmetry is exactly what I look for. Let me show you why I think this matters.

What Nokia Actually Is

Nokia is a Finnish multinational telecommunications and network infrastructure company operating in four distinct business segments: Network Infrastructure, Mobile Networks, Cloud and Network Services, and Nokia Technologies. They build the physical and software backbone that connects the world, fixed access networks, mobile radio systems, optical transport, IP routing, and increasingly, the data center networking infrastructure that AI depends on to function.

This is not a consumer company. Nokia does not sell to you and me. They sell to carriers, hyperscalers, defense organizations, utilities, and enterprises that need mission-critical connectivity at scale. Their customers are some of the largest and most well-funded organizations in the world, and the contracts they win tend to be long-term and deeply embedded.

The company’s transformation into an AI-focused infrastructure player accelerated significantly with two major developments. First, the acquisition of Infinera in February 2025, which dramatically strengthened Nokia’s optical networking portfolio and positioned them as an essential provider for handling the massive data flows required by AI workloads. Second, and perhaps more importantly, Nvidia made a $1 billion strategic investment in Nokia in October 2025. Since that investment, the stock climbed from roughly $6 to nearly $15 before pulling back to where it sits today. That Nvidia investment is not window dressing. It is a signal that the most important company in the AI chip ecosystem believes Nokia’s infrastructure is critical to the buildout they are enabling.

Nokia’s AI business is now growing 49% year over year. The company has built a EUR 1 billion backlog specifically in optical networking equipment. JP Morgan has a Buy rating on the stock. Argus upgraded to Buy as well. The institutional momentum is building quietly while retail investors are still sleeping on it.

How Nokia Has Implemented AI Into Its Business

This is where it gets really interesting to me, because Nokia is not just a company that benefits from AI spending. They are also actively deploying AI inside their own operations in ways that are making them faster, better, and more competitive than the legacy telecom infrastructure providers they compete against.

Nokia recently published a breakdown of exactly how AI is being used inside their Deploy and Integrate services, which is the division responsible for actually rolling out and connecting network infrastructure in the field. The complexity of this work is hard to overstate. Every delay, every quality issue, every safety risk in deployment translates directly into lost revenue for their customers. Nokia is using AI to attack every one of those friction points simultaneously.

Their AI-driven Nokia Delivery Platform acts as a central hub for managing complex projects from planning through execution. As a result of their digitalization of Deploy and Integrate services, first-time-right installation rates have improved by 25% while time to market has decreased by 30%. For a company deploying infrastructure at the scale Nokia operates, those numbers compound into enormous efficiency gains across thousands of projects globally.

Using drone-based automation and computer vision, Nokia can now automatically identify and catalogue equipment, antennas, and infrastructure from images or video captured during site visits, accelerating the process while improving accuracy. They have also built AI-powered audit capabilities that analyze large volumes of project data and drone-captured site photos to identify deviations and risks, enabling continuous monitoring that dramatically reduces manual effort. Their AI-based site inspector has already demonstrated the ability to surpass human-level accuracy and analyze hundreds of images consistently every single day.

On the safety side, Nokia is using computer vision to monitor compliance with personal protective equipment protocols in the field and detect hazards in real time. They are also exploring further automation through drones and robotics, with the ultimate goal of minimizing or eliminating human exposure to hazardous tasks.

What makes all of this particularly compelling is the scale. Nokia currently has more than 50 prioritized use cases for AI integration across their Deploy and Integrate unit, all being built into their Agentic AI automation platform. This is not experimentation. This is systematic deployment of AI across an entire service division, and the results are already showing up in their delivery metrics.

Nokia also recently introduced an agentic AI framework specifically for IP network operations, which would allow network systems to monitor themselves, identify issues, and take corrective action with minimal human intervention. For telecom operators trying to manage increasingly complex AI-era networks, that kind of autonomous operation capability is worth paying a significant premium for.

The bottom line on Nokia’s AI implementation is this: they are not just selling picks and shovels to the AI buildout. They are using AI internally to operate faster and more efficiently than their competitors, which creates a compounding advantage that shows up in margins, delivery timelines, and customer satisfaction over time.

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Options strategies have a reputation for being complicated, and honestly, that reputation scares most retail investors away before they even give them a fair shot. Spreads in particular tend to be the strategy people avoid the most, too many moving parts, too confusing, too risky. But here is the truth: call debit spreads have become one of the most important tools in my portfolio. They let me get meaningful upside exposure to stocks I am deeply convicted on without needing the capital to buy shares outright or pay expensive premiums for single-leg calls. If you have a small account and a long-term bullish outlook on specific names, this strategy deserves your full attention. Let me break it all down.

The Technicals: How A Call Debit Spread Actually Works

A call debit spread, also called a bull call spread, involves two legs executed at the same time on the same stock with the same expiration date. You buy a call option at a lower strike price and simultaneously sell a call option at a higher strike price. The premium you collect from selling the higher strike partially offsets the cost of buying the lower strike, which is exactly what makes this strategy so capital efficient.

The Width

The width of your spread is simply the difference between your two strike prices. A $10-wide spread means your long strike and your short strike are $10 apart. Width matters because it directly determines your maximum profit potential. A wider spread gives you more room to capture upside but also costs more in premium. A narrower spread is cheaper but caps your gains sooner.

The Premium

The net premium you pay is your total cost and your maximum loss on the trade. If you buy a $230 call for $8.00 and sell a $240 call for $3.00, your net debit is $5.00 per share, or $500 per contract since each contract represents 100 shares. That $500 is the most you can ever lose on that position, no matter what the stock does. That defined risk is one of the biggest advantages of this structure over buying naked calls.

Calculating Max Profit

Max profit is calculated by taking the width of the spread and subtracting the net premium paid. Using the example above, a $10-wide spread purchased for $5.00 nets you a max profit of $5.00 per share, or $500 per contract. To capture that full profit, the stock needs to be at or above your short strike at expiration. If the stock closes anywhere below your long strike at expiration, you lose the full premium paid. If it closes between your two strikes, your profit is calculated proportionally.

Breakeven At Expiration

Your breakeven point is your long strike price plus the net premium paid. In the example above, if you bought the $230 call and paid a $5.00 net debit, your breakeven at expiration is $235. The stock needs to be above $235 at expiration for you to make any money on the trade. This is why strike selection and time horizon matter so much when building these positions.

How Theta Works

Theta is the rate at which an option loses value due to time passing, and it is something every spread trader needs to understand. The good news with call debit spreads is that theta is not your biggest enemy, especially early in the life of the contract. Both legs of your spread are experiencing time decay simultaneously. Your long call is losing value to theta while your short call is also decaying, and those effects partially offset each other. However, as you get into the final weeks before expiration, theta accelerates sharply. The last 30 days of an options contract is where time decay becomes most aggressive. This is why I prefer spreads with longer expirations on my highest conviction trades, giving the thesis time to play out before theta becomes a meaningful drag on the position.

Stacking Vertical Spreads: How To Build A Position Over Time

One of the most underrated aspects of call debit spreads is the ability to stack them. Stacking means opening multiple spread positions on the same stock at different times, different strikes, or different expirations as your conviction grows or as the stock moves in your favor.

Here is a real scenario to walk through. Let’s say you are bullish on a stock trading at $120 and you open your first spread: a $125/$135 call debit spread expiring in six months for a net debit of $4.00. You are risking $400 per contract with a max profit of $600 if the stock hits $135.

A month later, the stock has pulled back to $115. Your thesis has not changed. In fact, you feel even more convicted because the fundamentals are strong and the price is lower. You open a second spread: a $120/$130 call debit spread on the same stock for $3.50. Now you have two positions working. Your average cost basis across both spreads is lower, your overall upside exposure is larger, and you still have clearly defined risk on every single contract.

Now let’s say the stock rallies to $130. Your second spread (the $120/$130) is approaching max profit territory. You can either close it and lock in the gain, or let it ride. Meanwhile your first spread (the $125/$135) still has more room to run. You now have optionality on two positions that you built systematically over time without ever putting up more capital than you were comfortable losing.

This is the power of stacking. It is not about putting everything in at once. It is about building a position in layers as the opportunity presents itself, always with defined risk, always with a clear understanding of what you stand to gain and what you stand to lose. For a small account, this approach lets you scale into conviction without overcommitting capital to any single entry point.

The Trades: 5 Call Debit Spreads I Am Watching Right Now

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A few days ago I posted something short and simple: there is a bottleneck in the AI industry right now, figure out where that bottleneck lies and you will find the right stocks. I said I would follow up with the full breakdown. This is that article.

Let me show you exactly what is happening, why the numbers coming out right now are unlike anything we have ever seen, and which layer of the AI stack I believe is the most important place to be positioned.

AI Is Not A Bubble — The Data Proves It

The divergence happening in the market right now is real and it is getting wider. The top 20 percentile of companies, the ones tied to artificial intelligence, are going up. Everything else is going down. Semiconductors and hardware names are up 68% over the last year. Energy names are up 18%. Almost everything else is negative.

This is not a coincidence and it is not hype. It is the market starting to price in something that most people still do not fully understand: agents. AI that does not just answer questions but actually performs tasks, learns recursively, creates new skills, spins up new agents to solve new problems, and then loops through that process again and again. This was never possible before. But now agentic AI may be the most disruptive form of labor we have ever seen, and it is just getting started.

When you start to zoom out and price in what that actually means for the total addressable market, you are looking at a digital AI industry worth roughly $4 trillion. Once you layer on physical AI, autonomous vehicles, and robotics, that number could exceed $6 trillion. We have barely scratched the surface.

The Capital Raise That Should Have Everyone’s Attention

Google just raised $85 billion to expand their AI infrastructure and compute. Let that number sit for a second. This is a company that generates $45 to $50 billion per quarter in cash from operations. That was not enough. They ended a decade-long share buyback streak that had been running since 2015, wiped it away in a single quarter, and raised $85 billion on top of it because the demand for compute is outpacing everything they can generate internally.

Here is where it gets interesting. They took that capital and turned around and paid SpaceX $920 million per month for GPUs, CPUs, memory, and AI components, in a deal running from October 2026 through June 2029. That is roughly $30 billion over less than three years. And this deal was priced at 2.2 times higher than the already elevated rate that Anthropic paid SpaceX in the Colossus 1 deal, which itself was three times the market rate for GPU compute at the time.

Why would one of the most profitable companies in the world pay six or seven times the market rate for chips? Because every single GPU that exists is fully sold out. There are roughly four customers competing for every GPU available. The chips cannot be manufactured fast enough. And Google said it plainly on their last earnings call: cloud revenue would have been higher if they could have met demand. They are compute constrained and they cannot buy their way out of it fast enough.

Meta is now reportedly considering raising tens of billions of dollars in a stock offering just to fund more data centers, and that compute is entirely for internal use, not even for sale. Amazon is expected to do something similar. These companies are pausing dividends, ending buybacks, and raising capital at scale because the opportunity in front of them is worth more than returning cash to shareholders right now.

The Revenue Backlog Nobody Is Talking About

Everyone talks about revenue growth, but the number that tells the real story is the backlog, revenue that is already committed and coming in the future.

Google’s cloud backlog went from $92 billion to $467 billion year-over-year. That is not a 63% growth rate. That is a nearly 400% increase in forward committed revenue. Oracle is sitting on $552 billion in backlog. Microsoft is at $633 billion. And CoreWeave, a company that barely existed a few years ago, already has a backlog of $98 billion, higher than where Google was just one year ago.

These companies are not spending because they hope demand will come. They have the customers. They have the contracts. They are spending to build the infrastructure to fulfill commitments they have already made.

The Models Are Getting Better Faster

Here is the part that should make you question every assumption you have about where the ceiling is.

The length of tasks that AI models can reliably complete on their own has doubled roughly every four months, up from an earlier trend of doubling every seven months. They are not just getting better. They are getting better faster. Month over month, not year over year.

The internal data coming out of Anthropic shows that code contribution per developer using Claude has gone from 1.5 times the pre-2025 average when Claude 4 launched, to 2.5 times with Sonnet, and now up to 8 times in Q2 with the latest models. Eight times. If you can 8x the output of every developer on your payroll, what is that worth to a business? And what does that do to the demand for the compute that runs those models?

Every new capability breakthrough creates a new wave of demand for chips and infrastructure. Claude Mythos is rumored to be close to release. ChatGPT 5.6 with a heavy focus on agentic workflows is reportedly in development. Each one of these releases does not slow the buildout down. It accelerates it.

The Five Layer Cake — And Where The Bottleneck Actually Is

Jensen Huang describes the AI stack as a five layer cake: energy, chips, infrastructure, models, and applications. To find the bottleneck, you have to go through each layer.

Energy is important and I am watching names like GE Vernova, Vistra Energy, and Verdiv Holdings closely. But energy infrastructure has been building for decades and there is existing grid capacity being deployed toward data centers. It is not the primary bottleneck right now.

Chips are the bottleneck. This is where everything hits a wall. You cannot manufacture them fast enough. TSMC is running at capacity. Every Nvidia GPU is spoken for before it is built. Broadcom is seeing 78% year-over-year growth in semiconductor solutions revenue as hyperscalers line up for custom silicon. AMD is accelerating at 57%. Micron, which handles the memory components inside every data center, is skyrocketing. The chip layer is where supply is most constrained and where pricing power is the highest.

Infrastructure is the second most critical layer because even when chips are available, you need somewhere to put them. Data centers take four to six years to build at scale. The companies that can build faster and secure early access to the newest GPU generations are worth a massive premium. CoreWeave is in the platinum tier for exactly this reason. They have a direct relationship with Nvidia that gets them first access to the newest chips, which means they can charge top rates for performance that nobody else can offer yet. Their revenue is expected to grow 190% year-over-year and their backlog of $98 billion speaks for itself. Oracle with $153 billion in debt is making the same bet: the opportunity is big enough that leverage is worth it.

Models and applications I am exposed to indirectly through the chip and infrastructure names. Microsoft owns a major stake in OpenAI. Google owns 14% of Anthropic, recently valued at close to a trillion dollars. Nvidia has a 3.5% stake in OpenAI and invested $100 million in CoreWeave back in April of 2023, a position that has since returned over 20x. Owning the chip and infrastructure layer gives you indirect exposure to every model and every application built on top of it.

The Scale Of What Is Coming

Jensen Huang said the cost of a single gigawatt data center is going from $50 to $60 billion up to $80 to $100 billion per gigawatt. OpenAI started 2025 saying they wanted to reach 10 gigawatts of compute by 2030. They have now revised that to 30 gigawatts. At $100 billion per gigawatt that is a $3 trillion buildout for one company. OpenAI is not even the largest AI lab anymore by revenue.

When you add up what Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and the major neoclouds are expected to spend between now and 2031, you are looking at roughly $12 trillion in capital deployment into AI infrastructure. That money flows through chips first and infrastructure second. The companies sitting in those two layers are going to be multiples higher than where they are today if even a fraction of these projections play out.

What I Am Doing

I have positioned the majority of my portfolio around this thesis. Nvidia is over 25% of my holdings because they are the most direct, highest margin, fastest growing name in the most constrained layer of the entire stack. CoreWeave is my infrastructure name and I believe it is one of the most asymmetric opportunities in the public markets right now given their growth trajectory, their Nvidia relationship, and a backlog that already rivals companies ten times their age.

The divergence between AI winners and everything else is not closing. It is widening. The companies that are not tying themselves to this shift are falling behind and that trend is only going to accelerate as the models get smarter, the agents get more capable, and the demand for compute keeps growing faster than anyone can build it.

Find the bottleneck. That is where the opportunity is.

The information provided in this article is for educational and informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Always do your own research and consult with a licensed financial professional before making investment decisions.

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If you’ve read my last piece on the stocks I think are great long-term buys, you know I have serious conviction on a handful of names heading into 2027 and 2028. This article is different: instead of just talking fundamentals and thesis, I’m going to walk you through the actual trades I’m looking at (or already in) to express that conviction through options.

Before we get to the specific strikes and expirations, let me give you the quick “why” behind each of these five names. If you’ve followed my work, none of this should be a surprise, but it’s important context for the trades I’m about to lay out.

I’ve been vocal about my long-term bullishness on SoFi for a while now. This is a company executing at a high level: record loan originations, a member base growing 35% year-over-year, and management guiding for 38-42% EPS growth through 2028, all while the stock gets treated like a risky regional lender. My thesis is that as the interest rate environment shifts and Wall Street starts valuing SoFi based on its actual fundamentals rather than rate-sensitivity fears, this stock re-rates significantly higher. That’s a multi-year thesis, which is exactly why I’m looking at long-dated options here.

I don’t think this needs much explanation if you’ve seen my posts. I believe NVDA remains significantly undervalued given where AI infrastructure spending is headed, especially with Vera Rubin ramping in the back half of 2026. The compute demand story isn’t slowing down, it’s accelerating. I want exposure to the upside here, and with a small account, I have to get creative about how I do that.

My thesis on Zeta is that the market has mistakenly lumped this company in with “legacy software getting disrupted by AI” names, when in reality Zeta’s entire platform is built on AI and a massive proprietary data moat. With the OpenAI partnership, the Marigold acquisition, and a fresh Buy rating from Bank of America, I think this name has serious multi-year upside, and I’m willing to pay up for that exposure given how cheap the stock still is in absolute dollar terms.

A Meta has had a rough stretch recently, and I think the market is underestimating how effectively this company is deploying AI across its ad business and its broader app ecosystem. I’ve already got some conservative exposure on here, and given the recent pullback, I’m considering adding more aggressive upside exposure as well.

ServiceNow got absolutely hammered in 2026 on fears that AI would cannibalize SaaS, and I think that thesis is just wrong. The company is positioning itself as the orchestration layer for AI agents across the enterprise, and at these depressed levels, I want upside exposure without committing the capital required to buy shares or calls outright.

Alright, that’s the “why.” Now let’s get into the actual trades. 👇

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The market has handed us an incredible opportunity right now. Whether you’re watching the broader AI infrastructure buildout, the fintech revolution, or the clean energy arms race powering it all, the companies I’m about to walk you through represent some of the most compelling long-term setups I’ve seen in years. And here’s the thing, I’m not just bullish at current prices. If these names continue to pull back, they become even better entry points. Every single one of these positions is built around a multi-year thesis, not a trade. I have a long-term outlook on each of these companies, and I’m not shaken by short-term volatility, I welcome it.

For each company below, I’ll give you a quick description so you know exactly what they do, followed by my personal thesis and the key catalysts I’m watching going forward. I’ll also be sharing specific trades I’m interested in entering across these names, so stay tuned for that in a follow-up piece.

$NOW — ServiceNow | Entry: $105

ServiceNow is the enterprise software backbone that large companies use to automate and manage their IT, HR, finance, and customer workflows. Think of it as the operating system that runs behind the scenes at Fortune 500 companies, making sure the right people, tools, and processes are connected and moving efficiently.

My thesis here is simple: the “AI kills SaaS” narrative that crushed this stock is fundamentally wrong when it comes to ServiceNow. The company isn’t being replaced by AI, it’s becoming the platform that deploys AI agents across the enterprise. More than half of its new revenue is already non-seat-based, meaning the bear case around per-user pricing erosion has largely already been addressed. The company is targeting $30 billion in subscription revenue by 2030, maintains a 97% customer retention rate, and just delivered 22% subscription revenue growth in Q1. At $105, we’re buying a company generating over $4.6 billion in free cash flow annually at a massive discount to where it was trading just months ago. The catalyst I’m watching is the continued rollout of Now Assist and AI agent products, plus any reacceleration in deal activity as the macro environment stabilizes.

$QCOM — Qualcomm | Entry: $200

Qualcomm is a semiconductor giant best known for its Snapdragon processors that power the majority of Android smartphones worldwide. But the story has evolved dramatically, Qualcomm now builds chips for AI-powered PCs, automobiles, IoT devices, and is pushing hard into data center inference with its new Dragonfly brand.

My thesis on Qualcomm is that the market is still pricing this like a legacy modem company when it’s quietly becoming one of the most undervalued AI silicon plays in the market. The edge AI story is real, as AI shifts from training massive models in the cloud to running trillions of inference requests on local devices, Qualcomm’s power-efficient chip architecture becomes a massive advantage over brute-force alternatives. Automotive revenue hit a record $1.3 billion in the most recent quarter and is expected to exceed $6 billion by fiscal year end. The company has also confirmed a hyperscaler custom silicon program and authorized a fresh $20 billion buyback while trading at a forward P/E around 16, an absurdly cheap multiple for a company this well-positioned. The catalyst I’m watching is the June 2026 Investor Day, where management is expected to detail its data center and physical AI roadmap.

$CRWV — CoreWeave | Entry: $98

CoreWeave is a specialized AI cloud infrastructure company that provides GPU compute at scale to AI labs, developers, and enterprises building and running AI models. Unlike general-purpose cloud providers, CoreWeave was built from the ground up around NVIDIA GPU clusters, making it the go-to destination for serious AI workloads.

My thesis on CoreWeave is that we are in the early innings of an AI infrastructure supercycle, and CoreWeave sits directly at the center of it. As AI workloads become more complex, particularly with the rise of agentic AI systems that chain together multiple reasoning steps, the demand for raw GPU compute is going to keep exploding. CoreWeave was named as one of the first cloud partners to deploy NVIDIA’s new Vera Rubin platform, which delivers up to 10x higher inference throughput at one-tenth the cost per token compared to Blackwell. That positions CoreWeave at the bleeding edge of where the industry is headed. The catalyst I’m watching is continued hyperscaler contract announcements and the commercial rollout of Vera Rubin-based instances in the second half of 2026.

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Anthony Noto has been at SoFi for eight years. The stock is down 40% year-to-date. Revenue grew 41% in Q1. Those two facts sitting side by side tell you everything you need to know about the current disconnect, and Noto spent an hour explaining exactly why he thinks the market is wrong.

The Stock vs. The Business

Noto opened with something most CEOs wouldn’t say out loud: the stock’s pain bothers him. A lot. But he’s clear about what’s driving it, and it’s not the business.

When SoFi entered 2026, the macro backdrop assumed two to three Fed rate cuts. That assumption vanished. The market is now pricing in zero cuts, possibly hikes. And for any company with lending exposure, that uncertainty compresses multiples, fast.

Noto's framing: the company went from five times tangible book value to two times. Not because earnings deteriorated, which they didn't, but because uncertainty around rates caused a multiple re-rating across all FinTechs with credit exposure.

The Flywheel Nobody Is Talking About

The centerpiece of Noto’s bull case isn’t the stock price, it’s lifetime value. His argument: SoFi is a low-cost, 100% digital operator that owns its own technology. That combination lets them offer better rates than anyone else, which attracts members, who take on more products, which generates more revenue per customer at near-zero incremental acquisition cost.

He used a concrete example. A personal loan generates roughly $800 of variable profit from a new member. The same loan taken by an existing member, where SoFi pays no acquisition cost, generates over $1,500. That’s the flywheel in action.

SoFi USD: The Stablecoin Nobody Expected

This was the section of the interview most retail investors probably didn’t expect. SoFi is launching its own stablecoin, SoFi USD, and Noto’s ambitions for it are enormous.

The core differentiation: every other company pursuing stablecoins has to take reserves and buy Treasuries to generate yield. That creates duration risk, credit risk, and liquidation risk. SoFi, as a national bank, can park reserves directly in its Fed master account, earning Fed funds rate with zero credit risk and instant liquidity via Fed wire.

Three places SoFi USD will be used immediately: crypto trading partners, Mastercard’s merchant settlement network (enabling 24/7 payments instead of Monday–Friday only), and SoFi’s existing 8 billion transaction Galileo platform.

SoFi Plus: 160,000 Paying Members in Six Weeks

SoFi Plus launched April 1st after a year of iteration. The premise is simple: $10 a month, and you get 4.5% interest on up to $20,000 in cash, versus 3.8% for standard direct deposit customers.

The math almost sells itself. A member with $10,000 in savings does the break-even calculation in about 30 seconds and realizes they’re ahead. Noto’s goal: 1 million paying members from a base of 15 million.

But the bigger insight is behavioral. When members upgrade to SoFi Plus, 90% of them are existing members, and two things happen: they increase deposits and spending on products they already have, and a significant portion adds an entirely new product. That’s lifetime value compounding on itself.

Four New Businesses. Zero Prior Revenue.

Noto was unusually transparent about the investment burden SoFi is carrying in 2026. Four entirely new businesses, SoFi Plus, SoFi USD, Big Business Banking, and Crypto, are all being funded this year for the first time. None existed in the 2025 P&L.

His defense: SoFi raised additional capital opportunistically, used it to put more loans on balance sheet, and the resulting net interest income covers all four new investment areas while still hitting the 60-cent EPS guidance. The margins have held at 30% through all of it.

The AWS of Fintech

SoFi Technology Solutions, the Galileo and Technisys business, has been the most misunderstood part of the company by Noto’s own admission. His reframe: SoFi itself is the most complex, demanding customer of its own technology platform. Nobody else has all of SoFi’s products on a single digital platform.

If you build the best technology for the most demanding customer, you should by definition have the best product to sell to everyone else. That’s the logic behind moving all infrastructure development into SoFi Technology Solutions, so that by definition, everything built is production-ready for third parties from day one.

Big Business Banking launches July 1st with full API capabilities, enabling crypto-native companies to operate in both fiat and crypto from a single, nationally chartered bank. It’s a market Silvergate once served, and no longer can.

What He Said to Retail Investors

Noto closed with a message that felt genuinely personal. He reads Twitter. He knows the frustration. He’s bought $2 million of stock this year at prices above current levels and was looking at LEAPS the night before the interview because he’s run out of liquid cash to allocate.

His ask of long-term holders: don’t measure this on a six-month window. The rate environment creates uncertainty that institutional portfolio managers can’t ignore — but it doesn’t change what the company is building. Eighteen consecutive quarters of Rule of 40 performance doesn’t happen by accident.

The Bottom Line

Noto’s interview wasn’t a hype session. It was a detailed, sometimes uncomfortable accounting of exactly where the business stands, why the stock is disconnected from it, and what catalysts need to happen for the gap to close.

The business is genuinely growing fast across every metric that matters. The multiple compression is real and rate-driven. And a CEO who has personally bought $2M of his own stock, at higher prices, while openly exploring LEAPS for more exposure is either very confident or very wrong.

Which one it turns out to be depends almost entirely on what the Fed does next.

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SoFi just delivered another strong quarter. Revenue hit a new high. Member growth accelerated. Deposits surged. Originations reached levels we have never seen before. The company posted its tenth straight profitable quarter and continued to scale like a real financial platform.

Yet the stock didn’t move.

This is exactly why I remain bullish. The fundamentals are improving faster than the stock price, and the market is missing the bigger picture.

What Stood Out to Me in Q1 2026

SoFi’s Q1 results were packed with data, but a few metrics jumped out immediately.

1. Member Growth

SoFi added 1.1 million new members in a single quarter.
Total members now sit at 14.7 million, up 35 percent year over year.

This is the kind of growth you expect from a consumer app, not a regulated bank. It shows the brand is resonating, the product suite is sticky, and the financial services productivity loop is working.

2. Brand Awareness

Unaided brand awareness reached 10 percent, an all time high.

This matters. Awareness drives organic acquisition. Organic acquisition drives lower CAC. Lower CAC drives higher margins. SoFi is building a national brand in a category where most consumers cannot name more than two digital banks.

Also take into account that Chyme has a brand awareness of nearly 35% with

3. Revenue Growth

Adjusted net revenue hit 1.1 billion dollars, up 41 percent year over year.

This is not a company growing at 10 or 15 percent. This is a company compounding at a rate that most banks can only dream about.

4. Margins

Adjusted EBITDA margin held at 31 percent, even with heavy investment in new products.

Margins holding steady while revenue grows is a sign of operating leverage. It means the platform is scaling efficiently.

These four metrics alone tell the story of a company gaining momentum, not losing it.

So Why Didn’t the Stock Move?

There were three reasons, and none of them have anything to do with the strength of the business.

1. EPS Stayed at 12 Cents

EPS came in at 12 cents, the same as last quarter.
Investors wanted acceleration. They wanted a clear step toward the company’s full year target of 60 cents.

Instead, they got stability.

2. Guidance Didn’t Change

SoFi kept its full year guidance the same.
The market wanted a raise. It didn’t get one.

3. Guidance Now Assumes Zero Rate Cuts

This is the part most people missed.

Management confirmed that their original guidance assumed two rate cuts, but the updated guidance assumes zero rate cuts.
And they still didn’t lower guidance.

That means SoFi expects to hit its numbers in a tougher macro environment than originally planned.
The market should have rewarded that. Instead, it punished the stock for not raising guidance.

This is a timing issue, not a thesis issue.

The Stock Is Still Down Meaningfully

SoFi is still far below its all time high of 32.74 dollars.
It has been consolidating in a tight 15 to 18 dollar range for months.

This is the kind of base that often forms before a larger move, but it needs a catalyst. EPS acceleration is likely that catalyst.

Until then, the stock may drift sideways. That does not change the long term story.

The Fundamentals Are Too Strong to Ignore

Here’s what the market is overlooking:

• Members up 35 percent year over year
• Products up 39 percent year over year
• Deposits above 40 billion dollars
• Net interest margin at 5.94 percent
• Fee based revenue scaling toward 1.5 billion dollars annually
• Record originations at 12.2 billion dollars
• Capital ratios far above regulatory minimums

This is not a company hoping for a turnaround.
This is a company executing.

Anthony Noto Keeps Buying Shares

This part matters more than people realize.

Over the past month, Anthony Noto has purchased:

Total: 100,778 shares

Total Dollar Amount: $1,751,800

Breakdown:

• May 8, 2026: 15,878 shares at $15.73 = $249,769
• March 17, 2026: 28,900 shares at $17.32 = $500,548
• March 2, 2026: 56,000 shares at $17.88 = $1,001,515

Executives sell for many reasons.
They buy for one.
They believe the stock is undervalued.

Noto has been consistent. He buys during volatility. He buys during consolidation. He buys when the market doubts the story.

That level of conviction from the person who sees the full picture is not something I ignore.

Options Activity Shows Growing Interest

The options chain is showing signs of accumulation.

• Call volume has been rising
• Longer dated calls are seeing steady interest
• Put volume is elevated but normal for a high short interest stock
• Implied volatility is stabilizing

This is not bearish positioning.
This is positioning for a move higher.

It’s Not an If, It’s a When

SoFi didn’t stall because the business is weak.
It stalled because EPS didn’t accelerate yet.

The fundamentals are strong.
The growth is real.
The balance sheet is healthy.
The brand is expanding.
The platform is scaling.
The CEO is buying.
The options market is leaning bullish.
And the stock is still far below its highs.

I’m not worried about whether SoFi recovers.
I’m only watching for when.

When EPS begins to move higher.
When guidance gets raised.
When the market finally prices SoFi like the full stack financial platform it has become.

Until then, I remain bullish. Extremely bullish.

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Right now, I’m in that preparation phase.

I currently have under $10,000 in my real Robinhood account. I’m not selling options in that account yet, not because I don’t understand the strategies, but because I don’t have the capital to run them safely. I’ve spent the last year teaching myself everything: collateral management, theta decay, rolling mechanics, assignment risk, and how to structure trades that win even when the stock doesn’t move.

And now, I’m confident.
Confident enough to run these strategies with real money.
Just not funded enough yet.

Why I Started Paper Trading With $1,000,000

To bridge that gap, I opened a Webull paper trading account and started with $1,000,000. Not because I expect to have that much anytime soon, but because I wanted to practice the full playbook:

• Multi ticker options exposure

• Long dated LEAPS

• Cash secured puts

• Covered calls

• Rolling ITM and OTM positions

• Managing a portfolio with dozens of moving parts

Paper trading lets me simulate the exact environment I’ll be operating in once my real account grows.

2026 Portfolio Goal

By the end of 2026, my target is simple:

Grow my real Robinhood account to $13,000–$14,000.

Once I hit that number, I’ll allocate:

• About 30 percent to options selling collateral

• About 70 percent to long term equity and cash reserves

I treat collateral as cash. It’s not locked up, it’s working. It’s earning theta. It’s generating premium. It’s giving me asymmetric risk and reward.

This is the foundation I’m building toward.

Breaking Down My Current Paper Trades

Now let’s talk about the actual positions, because this is where the practice becomes real.

SOFI Calls and Puts

I’m running a mix of long dated calls and puts on SoFi, which is exactly the kind of ticker where options selling thrives: high retail interest, strong liquidity, and a clear long term growth story.

• The Jan 2028 $20 Calls
  These are deep time LEAPS. They give you massive upside exposure with limited downside. If SoFi executes on member growth and profitability, these can explode in value.

• The May 2026 $19 Puts
  This is a classic cash secured put setup. If assigned, you get shares at a discount. If not, you keep the premium. The drawdown right now is temporary, SoFi’s volatility works for you here.

• The Jan 2027 $17 Calls

  I bought these when was below $17 and I believe the stock could hit $40 by the end of the year. The war is almost over, fintechs will start recovering, and now is the time to capitalize on this recovery.

ENPH Put

Enphase is beaten down but fundamentally strong. Selling puts on a high quality company at depressed prices is one of the most reliable long term strategies.

My May 2026 put is already green. If ENPH recovers even modestly, I’ll either:

• Keep the premium

• Or get assigned shares at a price you’re comfortable owning

Both outcomes are wins.

ZETA Calls

Zeta is a high beta growth name, exactly the kind of stock where LEAPS shine.

My Jan 2027 calls are already showing strong returns. These are the types of trades that can double or triple if the company executes even moderately well.

BMNR Calls and Puts

BMNR is a speculative but asymmetric play. Running both calls and puts gives me:

• Upside exposure

• Downside premium capture

• Flexibility to roll either direction

The Jan 2028 calls are already up nicely. The May 2026 puts are slightly red, but that’s normal. Short puts fluctuate heavily early in the trade. Time is on your side.

NVDA LEAPS

This is the crown jewel.

NVIDIA LEAPS are one of the most powerful long term options trades in the market. You’re holding Jan 2027 calls that are already up over 70 percent.

This is exactly why LEAPS exist.
You get long term exposure to a generational company without tying up massive capital.

Why I’m Confident Going Into Real Money Options Selling

Because I’ve put in the reps.

I’ve learned how to manage:

• Assignment

• Rolling

• Theta decay

• Volatility crush

• Portfolio margin impact

• Multi ticker exposure

• Long dated versus short dated risk

Paper trading isn’t about pretending.
It’s about preparing.

When my real account hits $13–14K, I’ll be ready to run a disciplined, cash secured, premium collecting strategy with confidence, not hope.

This year is about building the foundation.
Next year is about executing the plan.

This article is for informational and educational purposes only and should not be interpreted as financial advice. All investments carry risk. Always conduct your own due diligence and make decisions based on your personal financial situation and risk tolerance.

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Every cycle gives you a moment where the market misprices something so clearly that it feels like a gift. For me, BMNR is that moment. The setup is clean, the structure is powerful, and the timing could not be better.

This is not a meme trade. It is not a short‑term flip. It is a structural bet on Ethereum, reflexivity, and a market that is finally moving toward regulatory clarity.

Here is why I am excited.

What is BMNR?

For anyone new to the story, BMNR is essentially the Ethereum version of MicroStrategy. Their business model is simple and extremely effective.

They raise capital through equity issuance.
They convert that capital into ETH.
They stake the ETH to generate yield.
They use staking income and future capital raises to accumulate even more ETH.
They aim to grow ETH per share faster than dilution.

BMNR has publicly stated its goal. They want to own 5 percent of all ETH in existence. They already hold roughly 4.8 to 4.9 million ETH, which is close to 4 percent of the entire supply.

This is no longer a mining company. It is a publicly traded Ethereum treasury vehicle with institutional staking and a few high‑convexity equity positions such as Eightco for indirect OpenAI exposure and Beast Industries.

Where BMNR Trades Compared to ETH

This is the part that continues to surprise me.

BMNR market cap is roughly 9.8 billion dollars.
The value of BMNR’s ETH holdings is roughly 10 to 10.7 billion dollars.

BMNR is trading below the value of the ETH it owns.

That means you are effectively buying ETH at a discount. You also get the BMNR flywheel, the staking yield, the treasury growth, and the optionality for free.

ETH itself does not trade at a discount.
ETH does not have a premium that can expand.
ETH does not have a reflexive equity structure.

BMNR does.

What Is mNAV and Why Does It Matters?

mNAV is the market value of BMNR’s ETH per share. It is the single most important metric for understanding the opportunity.

When BMNR trades below mNAV, you are buying:

ETH
Staking yield
Treasury growth
Premium expansion potential
AI exposure
Beast exposure

All for less than the value of the ETH alone.

When BMNR trades above mNAV, the equity becomes a leveraged ETH vehicle. MicroStrategy has shown how powerful that dynamic can be.

Right now BMNR is in the rarest possible state. It is discounted relative to its ETH holdings while still offering reflexive upside and treasury growth.

This is why I am buying aggressively.

Tom Lee’s Strategy and the Accumulation Curve

Tom Lee is the intellectual engine behind BMNR’s ETH thesis. His strategy has been consistent and aggressive.

He has been buying ETH into weakness.
BMNR has purchased between 60,000 and 70,000 ETH per week at times.
They have even bought ETH directly from the Ethereum Foundation.
They now hold roughly 4% of all ETH and they are still accumulating.

If you chart BMNR’s accumulation curve, it is a straight line upward. It is one of the cleanest institutional accumulation patterns in the entire crypto market.

This is happening while retail is quiet and macro fear remains elevated. That is exactly when you want to see disciplined buying.

Why I Am Buying BMNR Right Now

Here is my personal strategy and why I am leaning in.

A. I believe the crypto market has bottomed.

Sentiment is washed out. Funding is flat. ETH has held strong despite geopolitical volatility.

B. BMNR’s mNAV setup is too attractive to ignore.

I am getting ETH exposure below NAV with leverage‑like upside if the premium expands.

C. The staking yield compounds the treasury.

BMNR is generating more than 200 million dollars in annualized staking income. ETH in my wallet does not do that.

D. Regulatory clarity is finally emerging.

The Clarity Act is moving forward and the direction is positive. Markets respond to clarity and BMNR is the cleanest equity wrapper for ETH exposure.

E. I am positioning for the next bull run.

If ETH behaves anything like it has in past cycles, the next leg could be explosive. BMNR gives me ETH beta, NAV expansion potential, and treasury growth all at once.

6. My Exit Strategy

I love holding crypto assets, but I also believe in disciplined allocation.

Here is my plan.

If ETH moves above six thousand dollars and if BMNR’s mNAV premium expands above two

I will consider rotating out of BMNR and into other opportunities.

Not because I am bearish on ETH.
But because reflexive equity wrappers can become overheated in euphoric markets. When that happens, the risk to reward shifts.

Right now the risk to reward is exceptional. In a full bull market, it may not be.

Final Thought

BMNR is one of the cleanest asymmetric opportunities I have seen in years. It offers discounted ETH exposure, staking yield, treasury growth, premium expansion potential, AI optionality, regulatory tailwinds, and a management team that is unapologetically long ETH.

I am not nibbling.
I am not dipping my toe.
I am buying aggressively because the math, the structure, and the timing all align.

This article is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. The author may hold positions in BMNR or other securities mentioned. All figures are sourced from BMNR public filings, earnings disclosures, and third‑party analyst research as of April 2026. Always conduct your own due diligence before making investment decisions.

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Everyone wants to overcomplicate this. I see traders with six monitors, three brokerage accounts, a Discord subscription, and a $200/month data feed, and they still can’t beat the market. The truth is, your edge doesn’t come from the number of tools you use. It comes from how well you use the right ones.

I’ve been trading stocks as a broke college student. No Bloomberg terminal. No fancy desk setup. Just my phone, a laptop, and five apps I’ve built my entire research workflow around.

Here’s something I want to be upfront about before we dive in: the first four apps are supplemental. I use them to gather ideas, catch signals, and read the room. I don’t make investment decisions based on what I see there. They feed the funnel. The fifth app, Claude, is where I actually pressure-test a thesis and turn an idea into a real, data-backed conviction trade.

That distinction matters. Let’s get into it.

App 1: X (Twitter)

If you’re not on FinX, the finance corner of X, you’re flying blind.

X’s algorithm is one of the most underrated tools in trading. Once you start engaging with finance content, the algorithm molds itself around it. Within a few days, your feed becomes a curated, real-time stream of stock discussion, breaking news, trade ideas, earnings reactions, and macro takes. It’s a living, breathing market conversation happening 24/7.

FinX moves faster than any news outlet. When earnings drop, when a CEO makes a statement, when the Fed chair says something unexpected, the reaction is on X before it’s anywhere else. Traders are posting charts, sharing entry prices, debating catalysts in real time. It’s genuinely one of the most active financial communities on the internet.

How I use it: I scroll FinX every morning before the open and throughout the day to catch what’s trending, what tickers are getting attention, and what the overall sentiment looks like. It’s my pulse check. If something is blowing up on FinX, I want to know about it before I sit down to do real research.

The caveat: There is a lot of noise. Bad takes. Pump accounts. Degenerates gambling their rent money. Never, and I mean never, trade off a tweet. Use X as a starting point, not a conclusion. It tells you what to look at. It doesn’t tell you what to do.

App 2: YouTube

YouTube is an underrated idea generation machine, and most serious traders aren’t using it properly.

There’s a massive ecosystem of finance creators on YouTube who break down individual stocks, sectors, earnings reports, macro trends, and trading strategies, many of them with serious research chops. These aren’t just guys shouting at cameras. Some of them are putting out genuinely thorough analysis on companies I hadn’t even considered.

Think about what that means: a completely free pipeline of people surfacing tickers and thesis ideas for you, with bull and bear cases laid out, so you can walk into your own research already oriented. It’s like having a research team you never have to pay.

How I use it: If I’m interested in a company, I’ll search it on YouTube and watch a few breakdowns, not to copy someone else’s trade, but to hear the thesis. What’s the bull case? What are the bears saying? What are the risks people are identifying? It helps me know what questions to ask before I do my own digging.

It’s also where I discover tickers I wasn’t looking for. A creator breaks down a sector play, mentions a company I’ve never heard of, and suddenly I’m down a research rabbit hole that turns into a real position.

The caveat: Every YouTuber has their own biases, positions, and incentives. Some have sponsorships. Some are long the stock they’re telling you about. Always verify everything independently. Take the idea, leave the conviction, that’s your job to build on your own.

App 3: Truth Social

This one surprises people. But hear me out.

Truth Social is on my phone for one reason: it’s where Trump posts first.

In the current market environment, political decisions move markets instantly. Tariff announcements, executive orders, policy shifts, trade deal updates, these things can send sectors up or down 5% in a matter of minutes. If you’re not watching for political catalysts, you’re leaving a massive edge on the table.

Since Truth Social is Trump’s own platform, it’s where he goes before X, before the press, before mainstream media picks it up. Being even 5 minutes early on a market-moving post is meaningful. By the time it hits the news cycle, the move has already started.

How I use it: I monitor Truth Social for policy announcements, tariff news, executive orders, and any commentary that could shake a sector or the broader market. It’s a direct line to the most market-moving political figure in the world right now. You don’t have to like it, you just have to be aware of it.

The caveat: Not every post matters. A lot of it is political noise that the market doesn’t care about. The skill is filtering for substance, the posts that have real policy implications, versus the ones that are just commentary. Over time, you develop a feel for what the market will react to and what it won’t.

App 4: TradingView

TradingView is the gold standard for technical analysis, and if you’re not using it, I genuinely don’t know what you’re looking at.

Clean charts. Powerful indicators. Multi-timeframe analysis. Community-shared ideas. Custom alerts. Everything you need to analyze price action is in one place, and the interface is clean enough that you can actually think while you’re using it.

Here’s how I think about the relationship between fundamentals and technicals: fundamentals tell you what to buy, technicals tell you when to buy it. You can have a perfect thesis on a company and still get wrecked if you buy into resistance at a terrible time. TradingView is how you get the timing right.

How I use it: Before I enter any position, I pull up the chart on TradingView. I’m looking at support and resistance levels, the broader trend, RSI, MACD, the standard toolkit. Where is price relative to its recent range? Is momentum building or fading? What does the setup look like across different timeframes?

I also set price alerts so I’m not staring at screens all day. TradingView will ping me when a stock hits a level I care about.

This is the visual side of due diligence. It doesn’t replace research, it complements it.

App 5: Claude

Everything above feeds into this.

Claude, by Anthropic, is the app that actually assists my investment decisions. It’s an AI assistant, but not in the surface-level “summarize this article” way people think about AI. I use Claude to do deep, comprehensive stock research, the kind of analysis that used to require hours of digging through SEC filings, earnings transcripts, analyst reports, and options chains.

We’re talking revenue breakdowns, cost structure analysis, growth metrics, valuation comparisons, analyst price targets, options premium analysis, breakeven calculations, implied volatility context, a complete due diligence report, built through a conversation.

How I use it: Once an idea is surfaced, from FinX, from YouTube, from wherever, I take it to Claude and start pressure-testing it. I’ll ask Claude to break down the financials. What does revenue growth look like over the past few years? What’s the margin profile? How does the current valuation stack up against peers? What are analysts targeting, and where is the stock relative to those targets?

Then I dig into the options side. If I’m considering a call position, I’ll have Claude compare different contracts, different strikes, different expirations, and walk through the math on premium decay, breakeven at expiration, and the risk-reward profile.

I recently did this with Zeta Global ($ZETA). I used Claude to do a complete breakdown, revenue streams, cost structure, analyst targets, growth trajectory, and a full comparison of different options contracts. Research that would have taken me hours became a 20-minute conversation. And the resulting analysis was thorough enough that I actually had conviction in the position, not just a vibe.

That’s the difference. An idea is just an idea. A thesis backed by data is a trade you can actually defend.

Claude doesn’t replace your judgment. You still have to think critically, weigh the risks, and make the final call. But it completely supercharges the research process. It’s the closest thing a college student with no resources has to a professional research desk.

The System: How It All Fits Together

Here’s the workflow, laid out clean:

1. X and YouTube surface ideas and sentiment. I’m catching what’s trending, hearing thesis ideas, reading the room on individual names and the broader market.

2. Truth Social keeps me ahead of political catalysts. In a market this sensitive to policy, being early on political news is a real edge.

3. TradingView confirms the technical setup. Once I have a name I’m interested in, I check the chart. Is the setup clean? Is this a good entry point, or am I chasing?

4. Claude does the deep research. This is where the idea gets stress-tested. Financials, valuation, options analysis, analyst consensus, everything goes on the table. If the thesis holds up, I have conviction. If it falls apart under scrutiny, I move on.

The first four apps feed the funnel. Claude is the filter.

I never trade off an idea alone. I trade off research. And these five apps, used together, give me the same research edge that used to require a Bloomberg terminal and a Wall Street desk. I have neither of those things. I have a phone and a laptop and a library of saved Claude conversations.

For a broke college student, that’s more than enough.

Not financial advice, just sharing the toolkit I’ve built. Do your own due diligence.

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Wall Street has committed a category error, and it is hiding in plain sight. SoFi Technologies trades at a 10–12× bank P/E multiple, the same multiple assigned to JPMorgan, a century-old institution with $3.9 trillion in assets and a fundamentally different business model. But SoFi is not one business. It is three distinct, high-growth businesses bundled inside a single ticker. When you unbundle them and assign each segment its correct peer multiple, every independent valuation method converges on the same answer: $26–28 per share, against a current price of $15.63. That is a 66–79% mispricing. And an actuarial probability-weighted expected value calculation puts the number at $27.90.

The Setup: A 52% Discount on a Record Quarter

SoFi hit an all-time high of $32.73 in November 2025. It now trades at $15.63, 52% lower, despite reporting arguably the best fundamental quarter in the company’s history. That divergence is the entry point.

FY2025 tells the story in numbers. Revenue reached $3.59 billion with an EBITDA margin of 29%. EPS turned positive at $0.39, compared to a $(1.00) loss as recently as 2021. The company carries a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.17, near-zero leverage, with $3.1 billion in net cash. Members grew to 13.7 million, up 35% year-over-year. Deposits rose to $37.5 billion, up 20% YoY. SoFi beat earnings estimates in 7 of its last 8 quarters.

None of this looks like a distressed bank caught in a credit cycle. It looks like a high-growth platform company caught in a macro selloff that did not discriminate between quality and mediocrity. That indiscriminate selling is the opportunity.

The Market’s Category Error

The core mispricing stems from a classification problem. When investors see “bank charter,” they apply a bank multiple. Historically, that instinct was correct. Banks are cyclical, capital-intensive, balance-sheet-heavy businesses that deserve conservative multiples. But SoFi’s bank charter is a funding mechanism, not its business model.

SoFi is actually three separate companies operating under one roof:

First, a risk-transfer platform (the Loan Platform Business, or LPB) that originates, underwrites, and services loans, then sells the credit risk to institutional buyers. This is pure fee income with zero balance sheet exposure on the transferred portion. It should be valued like a fintech platform, at 20–35× earnings, not like a bank.

Second, a member growth engine with 13.7 million members and 91% annual retentionamong members holding three or more products. The constraint on growth is brand awareness: SoFi sits at 9.6% while Chime is at 39% and PayPal at 78%. Ninety percent of the addressable market has never heard of SoFi. That is not a weakness. That is untapped compounding.

Third, a fintech infrastructure layer. Galileo and Technisys power the back-end operations for Chime, Current, Dave, and Robinhood. SoFi’s direct competitors pay SoFi to run their operations. At 135 million accounts powered and 50 billion API calls per year, this segment alone would command $5–7 billion at peer infrastructure multiples.

The market prices all three as if they were a single community bank in Ohio. They are not.

An Actuarial Lens: Risk Transfer as the Core Thesis

Actuaries do one thing exceptionally well: they quantify risk, price it correctly, and transfer it efficiently. The entire architecture of insurance, where a primary insurer cedes risk to a reinsurer via a treaty, exists because centralizing risk assessment on the balance sheet is inferior to distributing it to parties best positioned to bear it. The Managing General Agent (MGA) model emerged from exactly this logic: an MGA underwrites, prices, and services policies, then cedes the underwriting risk to a carrier. The MGA collects fees. The carrier holds the capital. The MGA’s economics are unaffected by whether claims materialize.

SoFi’s Loan Platform Business is structurally identical to an MGA.

SoFi originates and underwrites loans. It applies its credit model to select borrowers, average FICO 745, average income $157,000. It then sells 53% of that credit risk to institutional capital market partners who want yield but lack origination infrastructure. SoFi collects an origination fee and a servicing spread. It retains no credit loss exposure on the sold portion. The LPB is not lending. It is underwriting-as-a-service.

The actuarial implication is significant. LPB revenue grew from $26 million in Q1 2024to $194 million in Q4 2025, eight quarters, approximately 3× year-over-year growth, annualizing at $775 million and approaching a $1 billion run rate. That revenue stream has the same risk profile as insurance commission income: fee-based, recurring, and structurally insulated from the credit cycle on the transferred portion. The market prices it as loan revenue. It is not loan revenue. It is fee income with a fintech multiple attached.

The short thesis against SoFi centers on credit quality: the claim that SoFi lends recklessly to risky Gen Z borrowers who will default in a downturn. The data does not support this. SoFi’s net charge-off rate fell from 3.55% to 2.80% over the past year while the industry average held flat at 2.87%. SoFi’s borrowers are not subprime. They are high-income, high-FICO professionals using SoFi as a financial operating system. The short thesis is pricing in a credit risk that has demonstrably declined.

The Numbers Don’t Lie

The actuarial expected value calculation runs a standard probability-weighted scenario analysis across four outcomes:

Probability-weighted expected value: $27.90, 79% above current price.

This is not optimistic hand-waving. It is the standard actuarial methodology applied to equity valuation: assign honest probabilities, run the expected value, compare to price. When an asset trades at a 44% discount to its probability-weighted expected value, the question is not whether to own it. The question is position sizing.

The LPB trajectory alone makes the math compelling. At its current 3× year-over-year growth rate applied to a $26 forward P/E on $1.31 estimated FY2027 EPS, the stock reaches $26.20 with zero credit from Galileo, Technisys, or member monetization. Every other segment is effectively free at today’s price.

Five Methods, One Answer: $26–28

The most robust valuation setups are those where independent methods, built on entirely different assumptions and data inputs, converge on the same number. SoFi has that convergence.

Method 1: Actuarial Expected Value: $27.90, as calculated above.

Method 2: Sum-of-Parts (SOTP): Valuing LPB at a 20× fee-income multiple, Galileo/Technisys at peer infrastructure multiples, and the bank segment at a standard 10× P/E produces a SOTP range of $22–29. The current price implies Galileo and Technisys are worth approximately zero.

Method 3: Peer Comps: Applying a 20× P/E to $1.31 FY2027E EPS, a conservative multiple for a company growing earnings at 35%+, yields $26.20.

Method 4: PEG Bridge: A PEG ratio of 0.6× at current growth rates implies significant multiple expansion toward peers, converging on the same $26.20 figure.

Method 5: Analyst Consensus: JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and Barclays carry an average price target of $26.75.

Five methods. Four of them derived independently. All five fall in the $26–28 range. This is not a coincidence. It is convergent evidence that the current price is anomalous.

Catalysts: What Drives the Re-Rate

The mispricing is real. The catalyst schedule is also unusually clear.

S&P 500 inclusion is the highest-probability near-term catalyst. SoFi has now reported four consecutive profitable quarters and carries a market cap above $18 billion, the two primary inclusion criteria. When the S&P adds a constituent, every index fund tracking the S&P 500 must buy it. That is $7 trillion in passive AUM forced into the stock. Inclusion events historically drive 3–5% price appreciation in the days surrounding announcement alone, with sustained buying pressure over the weeks of rebalancing that follow.

LPB approaching the $1 billion annualized run-rate is the fundamental catalyst. Each quarterly print that demonstrates this is not a cyclical blip but a structural revenue engine forces analysts to reconsider their bank-multiple framework.

The GENIUS Act, advancing through Congress, would establish a federal stablecoin regulatory framework and legitimize crypto-native financial products. SoFi has positioned itself for this: it restored crypto trading in 2024 and holds strategic optionality in a segment that carries very high platform-level margins.

Earnings beats continue to be additive. Seven beats in eight quarters create a re-rating environment where analysts are structurally behind the fundamental trajectory, leading to upward estimate revisions that pull target prices higher.

Risks

No thesis is honest without a clear-eyed risk section.

The most credible bear case is a credit loss spike above 4%. If macro conditions deteriorate sharply and SoFi’s charge-off rate reverses its downward trend, the bank segment’s earnings would compress and the short thesis would partially validate. This risk is mitigated, but not eliminated, by the LPB’s structural risk transfer and the high quality of the existing loan book.

Student loan policy reversal is a political risk. Any administration action that restructures or cancels federal student loan obligations could disrupt SoFi’s student refinancing origination pipeline, which remains a meaningful segment.

Big bank digital expansion, particularly from JPMorgan and Bank of America deploying capital into mobile-first products, could compress SoFi’s member acquisition economics over a 3 to 5 year horizon.

A macro recession that delays the consumer spending recovery would slow member growth and reduce products-per-member monetization. With 1.48 products per member on average against a theoretical ceiling above 4, any deceleration in cross-sell is a valuation headwind.

These are real risks. They do not change the probability-weighted math, but they belong in the model.

The Bottom Line

SoFi is being priced as a bank. It is a risk-transfer platform, a member growth engine, and a fintech infrastructure business. Three distinct, high-multiple businesses trading under one discount multiple because Wall Street’s category system has not caught up to what SoFi actually built.

The actuarial framework is unambiguous: when five independent valuation methods converge on $26–28, and an honest probability-weighted scenario analysis produces $27.90, a $15.63 price tag is not a reflection of fair value. It is a reflection of misclassification.

The market will eventually price SoFi for what it is. The question is whether you own it before that happens.

This article is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. The author may hold positions in securities discussed. All figures are sourced from SoFi Technologies public filings, earnings releases, and third-party analyst reports as of April 2026. Always conduct your own due diligence.

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Share Growth Without Regrets

What Is Zeta Global?

If you haven’t heard of Zeta Global (NYSE: ZETA), that’s fine. Most people haven’t. That’s part of the opportunity.

Zeta Global Holdings Corp. is an AI-powered marketing technology company headquartered in New York. It operates the Zeta Marketing Platform (ZMP), an omnichannel, data-driven cloud platform that gives enterprises consumer intelligence and marketing automation at scale. CEO David A. Steinberg has been building this thing since 2007. They IPO’d in June 2021. About 2,191 employees.

Here’s what makes it different from every other “AI company” being pitched to you right now: Zeta’s business model is built around data volume, not seat licenses. Revenue scales with the number of marketing decisions being processed through the platform. The more campaigns, the more data queries, the more signals — the more Zeta earns. That’s a fundamentally different, and better, economic structure than most SaaS companies.

Their proprietary “SuperGraph” covers 245M+ US adults and 535M globally, processing 1 trillion+ signals. They use machine learning to predict consumer intent, and they sell that intelligence to enterprises who need to reach the right person at the right moment. We’re talking email, SMS, social, CTV, programmatic display, CDP software, the full stack.

They recently launched Athena, a conversational AI agent for enterprise marketing. They also just acquired Marigold, a loyalty marketing platform expected to contribute ~$190M in 2026 revenue.

The client list? 51 of the Fortune 100. 120+ of the Fortune 500.

This is not a startup. This is a mature AI platform hiding in plain sight.

Read more

Part 5 is where everything becomes strategic.
This is where LEAPs stop being a single trade and start becoming a long term framework you can use across cycles, across companies, and across market environments.

This is the advanced level.
The part that turns LEAPs into a repeatable system.

Using LEAP Call Spreads to Reduce Cost and Increase Efficiency

A LEAP call spread is simply buying a long dated call and selling another long dated call above it.
The goal is not to cap your upside.
The goal is to reduce the cost of the position while keeping most of the exposure.

This matters when:

You want exposure to a company but the LEAP premiums are expensive,
You want to reduce theta without giving up time,
You want to lower your breakeven point,
You want to build a position across multiple companies without overspending.

A call spread forces discipline.
It makes you define your price target and structure your risk around it.

Stacking LEAPs Across Multiple Companies

Once you understand how to evaluate companies and structure contracts, you can begin building a LEAP portfolio instead of a single LEAP position.

A LEAP portfolio works best when you choose companies that have:

Clear multi year catalysts,
Strong balance sheets,
Consistent execution,
A history of beating expectations,
A long runway for growth.

The goal is not to own ten LEAPs.
The goal is to own two or three companies that you understand deeply and can hold through cycles.

This is where LEAPs become a long term leverage tool rather than a one off bet.

Rotating LEAPs Year to Year

A LEAP is not something you hold until expiration.
It is something you rotate.

The rotation cycle looks like this:

Enter with 24 to 36 months of time,
Manage the position through the first year,
Roll or exit in the 6 to 12 month window,
Re enter the next cycle with fresh time.

This creates a rhythm.
You are always holding long dated exposure,
You are never fighting theta,
You are always positioned for the next leg of the companys growth.

This is how professionals use LEAPs.
Not as a gamble, but as a rolling long term instrument.

Using LEAPs to Express Macro Views

LEAPs are not only a company specific tool.
They can also be used to express macro themes.

For example:

If you believe interest rates will fall, you can target rate sensitive sectors.
If you believe a technology cycle is beginning, you can target companies with high operating leverage.
If you believe a recession is ending, you can target consumer discretionary names.
If you believe a new regulatory environment will benefit a sector, you can position early.

The key is that LEAPs give you time.
Macro themes rarely play out in weeks.
They play out in quarters and years.

LEAPs let you position early without needing to time the exact moment the market wakes up.

Building a Long Term LEAP Framework

At the advanced level, LEAPs become part of a broader system.
A system built around:

Company selection,
Contract selection,
Position management,
Rolling discipline,
Portfolio construction,
Macro awareness.

This is where LEAPs stop being a trade and start being a strategy.

A strategy that lets you participate in long term growth with defined risk,
A strategy that lets you scale into conviction over time,
A strategy that gives you leverage without recklessness,
A strategy that rewards patience instead of speed.

This is the final step in the series.
The point where you now understand LEAPs from the ground up.

Read more

Managing a LEAP is about timing, discipline, and understanding how long‑dated options behave as the market shifts. This is where your strategy becomes a system instead of a guess.

Entering the Position

The best LEAP entries almost always come during fear. When the market is panicking, when a sector is selling off, when volatility is compressed, or when earnings create an overreaction, that’s when LEAPs are mispriced.

A LEAP is a long‑term bet on a business.
Short‑term fear gives you long‑term value.

If the company is strong but the market is emotional, that’s when I start building.

Adding to the Position: The Right Way to DCA

Most traders add to LEAPs at the wrong time, usually when the contract is already dying. My approach is simple: I only add when the contract still has time to work.

• I start with expirations 18–30 months out

• I stop adding once the contract drops under 12 months

• Under a year, theta accelerates and flexibility disappears

If I’m going to DCA, I do it early, not late.

Handling Drawdowns

Every LEAP will go red at some point. The key is understanding why.

If the company’s long‑term thesis breaks, I exit.
If the drawdown is macro noise, I hold or add.
If it’s volatility compression, I stay patient, vega will come back.
If it’s because I’m too close to expiration, I roll early.

Managing a LEAP is about reacting to the reason, not the color.

Rolling the Position

Rolling is one of the most misunderstood parts of LEAP trading. Most people wait too long and roll when theta is already accelerating.

I roll when my LEAP hits the 9–12 month window.
That’s when:

• Time decay steepens

• Vega sensitivity drops

• Flexibility disappears

Rolling early resets the clock and keeps the thesis alive. I simply sell the current contract and buy the same strike further out, or move slightly deeper ITM if I want more delta.

Exiting the Position

A LEAP is not meant to be held until expiration. That’s how you get crushed by theta and lose the leverage you paid for.

My exit window is 6–9 months before expiration.
By then, I’ve usually captured:

• Most of the delta

• Most of the vega expansion

• Most of the long‑term move

Holding beyond that point becomes a game of diminishing returns.

Protecting Profits

You don’t need to babysit a LEAP, but you do need to stay aware of the business. I monitor:

• Earnings

• Guidance changes

• Major macro shocks

• Sector‑wide rotations

If the company is executing, I hold.
If the company is accelerating, I may add.
If the company is stalling, I trim.
If the company is deteriorating, I exit.

The goal is to stay aligned with the business, not the noise.

The LEAP Management Mindset

Managing a LEAP is about patience, timing, and understanding how long‑dated options behave. It’s about knowing when to step in, when to step back, and when to reset the clock. It’s about letting the business do the heavy lifting while you manage the structure around it.

This is the part of LEAP trading that turns a good idea into a profitable outcome.

Read more

By now, you’ve learned two things:

Part 1: What LEAPs are and why market fear creates opportunity
Part 2: How to evaluate the company before ever touching the option chain

Now we finally get into the part everyone waits for:

How to structure the actual LEAP contract.

This is where beginners usually get overwhelmed, strikes, expirations, Greeks, volatility, decay. But once you understand the logic behind each piece, choosing a LEAP becomes simple and repeatable.

Let’s break it down in the cleanest way possible.

Why LEAPs Behave Differently Than Short‑Term Options

Before we talk strikes and expirations, you need to understand one thing:

LEAPs don’t move like weekly or monthly options.

Short‑term options are driven by noise.
LEAPs are driven by the long‑term story.

Here’s what makes LEAPs unique:

• They decay slower

• They react more to fundamentals than headlines

• They behave more like stock as delta increases

• They benefit more from volatility shifts

• They give your thesis time to play out

This is why LEAPs are a long‑term conviction tool, not a day‑trading instrument.

Understanding the Greeks

Most people learn the Greeks in a way that makes them more confused.
So let’s simplify them into plain English, and then explain what they mean for LEAPs.

Delta — How Much Your LEAP Moves With the Stock

Delta tells you how much your option moves when the stock moves.

If the stock goes up $1:

• A delta of 0.30 → your LEAP goes up $0.30

• A delta of 0.60 → your LEAP goes up $0.60

• A delta of 0.80 → your LEAP behaves almost like stock

For LEAPs, delta is the most important Greek.

Why?

Because delta tells you how much exposure you actually have to the company.

What I look for:
Delta between 0.60 and 0.80 — the sweet spot where:

• You get strong stock‑like movement

• You avoid the decay trap of OTM options

• You get leverage without gambling

This is why I rarely buy out‑of‑the‑money LEAPs.
They simply don’t give you enough exposure to the company’s long‑term story.

Theta — How Fast Your LEAP Loses Value Over Time

Theta is time decay.

Short‑term options decay fast.
LEAPs decay slow.

But let’s make this real with examples:

• If theta = 0.005, your LEAP loses $0.50 per day

• If theta = 0.01, your LEAP loses $1.00 per day

• If theta = 0.02, your LEAP loses $2.00 per day

Compare that to weekly options, where theta can be $20–$50 per day.

This is why LEAPs give you breathing room.
Time decay is present, but it’s not suffocating.

For LEAPs, theta is background noise, not a threat.

What I look for:
Expiration 18–36 months out.
This gives the company time to execute without theta eating you alive.

Vega — LEAP’s Reaction to Volatility

Vega measures how much your LEAP gains or loses when implied volatility (IV) changes.

Here’s the simplest way to understand it:

If vega = 0.10, and implied volatility rises by 1%:

• Your LEAP increases by $0.10
  

  If IV rises by 5%:

• Your LEAP increases by $0.50
  

  If IV rises by 10%:

• Your LEAP increases by $1.00

This is why LEAPs love volatility spikes.

Now here’s the key insight most beginners never learn:

When you buy LEAPs during low volatility, you profit twice:

1. Delta increases as the stock recovers

2. Vega increases as volatility rises back to normal

This is why I target LEAPs during fear-driven selloffs:

• Volatility is low

• Prices are discounted

• Vega expansion boosts the contract

• Delta increases as the stock recovers

You’re getting paid on both the stock move and the volatility normalization.

This is one of the biggest edges in LEAP trading.

Choosing the Right Expiration

Your LEAP expiration should match the time the company needs to prove you right.

Too short → you get crushed by volatility
Too long → you overpay for time

The sweet spot:
18–36 months out

But here’s the nuance I personally use, and it’s something I’ve never seen taught:

If I’m debating between two expirations that are close (3–6 months apart), I calculate the “premium per day.”

It’s simple:

This exposes:

• When a contract is overpriced relative to time

• When you’re paying too much for too little runway

• When the longer expiration is actually the better deal

Sometimes the contract with more time is cheaper per day than the shorter one.
That’s the one I choose.

My personal rule for DCA’ing LEAPs

If I plan to add to my position or dollar‑cost average:

• I always go out at least 18 months

• I never DCA a LEAP with less than 12 months left

• Under a year, the decay accelerates and flexibility disappears

My mark is simple:

18 months to enter, 6–9 months to let them play out, then I exit.

This keeps me disciplined and prevents me from throwing good money after bad contracts.

Choosing the Right Strike Price

This is where most beginners blow up.

They buy cheap, out‑of‑the‑money LEAPs because they look “affordable.”
But cheap contracts are cheap for a reason, they rarely pay.

Here’s the simple rule:

If you want long‑term exposure, buy long‑term exposure.

What I look for:

• Deep ITM (delta 0.80+) for maximum safety

• ITM (delta 0.60–0.75) for balanced leverage

• ATM only when volatility is unusually low

What I avoid:

• OTM LEAPs

• Low‑delta contracts

• Anything that requires a perfect move to win

But if you do choose to buy an OTM LEAP, here’s the mindset you must have:

Your price target should still be well above your strike price.

If your strike is $20 and your price target is $21, that’s not a LEAP, that’s a hope.
OTM LEAPs only make sense when:

• Your thesis expects a meaningful move

• The stock has room to run

• Your target is comfortably above the strike

• You’re not relying on a perfect scenario

OTM LEAPs require conviction and distance.
If your target barely clears the strike, the contract is working against you.

A LEAP is not a lottery ticket.
It’s a long‑term investment tool.

Read more

Most beginners skip this step. They jump straight to the option chain, hunting for cheap contracts or big percentage moves. That’s how people end up buying long‑dated calls on companies with no real long‑term story.

A LEAP is not a lottery ticket.
It’s a long‑term thesis expressed through an options contract.

So Part 2 is about the part that actually matters:
How to choose the right company.

Why the Company Matters More Than the Contract

A LEAP gives you time, but time only helps if the business is moving in the right direction. If the company is deteriorating, time works against you. If the company is strengthening, time becomes your advantage.

This is why I always start with the fundamentals, not the option chain.

When I evaluate a company for a potential LEAP, I’m asking one simple question:

Is this business likely to be meaningfully stronger 12–36 months from now?

If the answer is no, I move on.
If the answer is yes, I dig deeper.

Step One: Understand the Long‑Term Story

Every great LEAP trade has a narrative behind it. Not hype. Not social‑media excitement. A real story that explains why the next few years could look different from the last few.

I look for companies that have:

A clear growth driver
A product or service gaining traction
A business model that scales
A management team that executes
A long runway ahead of them

A LEAP is a bet on the future.
So you need a company that actually has one.

Step Two: Look for Consistent Execution

A company can have a great story and still be a terrible investment if it can’t execute.

So I look at:

Revenue growth
Margin trends
Customer growth
Guidance
Earnings consistency

You don’t need perfection.
You just need a company that is steadily moving forward.

If the business is improving quarter after quarter, a LEAP gives you the time to let that improvement show up in the stock price.

Step Three: Understand How the Stock Behaves

Not all stocks move the same way. Some grind upward slowly. Some swing wildly. Some explode on catalysts. Some drift sideways for months.

This matters because LEAPs behave differently depending on the stock’s personality.

A stable, predictable stock often creates cleaner LEAP setups.
A volatile stock can work too, but you need to understand what you’re signing up for.

I’m not looking for excitement.
I’m looking for reliability.

Step Four: Check Liquidity and Market Interest

This is the part most beginners ignore.

A LEAP with thin volume or a wide bid‑ask spread can trap you in a position you want to exit. Before I ever consider a contract, I make sure the option chain is liquid enough to enter and exit without fighting the market.

If the options are illiquid, I don’t force it.
There are too many good companies to waste time on bad chains.

Step Five: Make Sure the Thesis Has Time to Play Out

A LEAP is not a short‑term trade.
It’s a long‑term expression of conviction.

So I ask:

Is this a company whose story unfolds slowly?
Is there a catalyst that takes time?
Is the market underestimating the next 12–36 months?

If the answer is yes, that’s when a LEAP makes sense.

If the story is short‑term, I don’t use LEAPs.
If the story is unclear, I don’t use LEAPs.
If the story is hype‑driven, I don’t use LEAPs.

A LEAP is a long‑term tool.
It needs a long‑term story.

Putting It All Together

By the time I finish evaluating a company, I know:

Whether the business is improving
Whether the long‑term story is real
Whether the stock behaves predictably
Whether the options are liquid
Whether the thesis needs time

Only then do I even consider looking at the option chain.

This is the part most people skip.
This is also the part that separates a LEAP that works from a LEAP that quietly bleeds.

Where We Go From Here

Now that you know how to choose the right company, Part 3 will take you into the next step:

How to structure the actual LEAP contract.

We’ll break down:

Strike prices
Expirations
Delta, theta, and vega
How LEAPs behave differently than short‑term options
How to think about time decay and volatility

This is where the strategy becomes technical — but also where it becomes fun.

Read more

That’s the entire spirit behind LEAP options.

Before we get into the mechanics, I want to start with a story that taught me this lesson in real time.

The $4,000 Lesson

In early 2025, the market opened the year with a sharp pullback. Tariff headlines were everywhere. Social media was screaming recession. Stocks were tanking, and not because companies suddenly became worse businesses, but because macro fear was drowning out fundamentals.

I bought LEAPs on SOFI during that drawdown. Within months, the position was up over $4,000.

And then I watched the entire gain evaporate because I didn’t have an exit plan.

That swing, from a huge win to a round‑trip loss, taught me two things:

1. Early‑year drawdowns are often mispriced fear, not real deterioration.

2. LEAPs give you the time to let fundamentals win, but you still need discipline.

That experience is why I’m writing this series. LEAPs are powerful, but only if you understand how to use them.

So What Exactly Is a LEAP Option?

A LEAP (Long‑Term Equity Anticipation Security) is simply a call option with a long expiration date, usually 1 to 3 years out.

Just like a typical call option, you are given the right to buy 100 shares of the stock at the strike price. As the price of the stock increases, the value of your option contract increases in value according to your delta and Vega values. (We’ll cover this in part 2)

The long-term time frame is what makes LEAP options special.

A LEAP gives you:

• Time for a thesis to play out

• Control of 100 shares with far less capital

• The ability to turn volatility into opportunity instead of something to fear

Most investors try to time bottoms. LEAPs let you sidestep that game entirely. You don’t need to nail the exact low, you just need to buy when fear is high and fundamentals are intact.

That’s why early‑year pullbacks are so attractive. They’re often driven by macro noise, not company deterioration. LEAPs let you step into that noise with a long enough horizon to let reality catch up.

Why Investors Use LEAPs

Think of LEAPs as a way to express long‑term conviction without tying up long‑term capital.

If you believe a company is undervalued, misunderstood, or temporarily beaten down, a LEAP lets you capture the upside of the next 12–36 months without buying 100 shares outright.

It’s leverage — but controlled leverage.
It’s speculation — but structured speculation.
It’s long‑term investing — but with asymmetric payoff.

And when the market is in pain, that asymmetry becomes even more attractive.

Why Market Pain Creates LEAP Opportunity

When macro headlines hit such as tariffs, inflation scares, rate‑cut delays, geopolitical noise, stocks often fall off simultaneously. Fundamentals don’t change that quickly. But prices do.

If you remember April 2025, the market crashed due to tariffs. Sentiment was weak and fear was entering the market, but the fundamentals of many of my favorite stocks were intact.

That disconnect is where LEAPs shine.

A LEAP bought during a panic has two advantages:

1. The option is cheaper due to the stock sell-off.

2. You’re buying time at a discount while everyone else is selling fear.

That’s exactly what happened with my SOFI trade. The business didn’t suddenly become worse. The market simply overreacted. LEAPs let me step into that overreaction, and they rewarded me for it.

Why I Believe in Paper Trading First

Before I ever put real money into LEAPs, I spent months paper trading them. I built mock portfolios, tracked hypothetical positions, and tested different strike/expiration combinations.

Those paper portfolios grew over 100%.

More importantly, they taught me how LEAPs behave — how they move, how they decay, how they react to earnings, and how they respond to macro shocks.

If you’re new to LEAPs, paper trading isn’t optional. It’s the training ground. It gives you the reps without the risk.

(I’m currently spending 2026 learning how to sell options on Webull)

Where We Go From Here

This is Part 1, the foundation. You now understand:

• What LEAPs are

• Why investors use them

• Why market pain creates opportunity

• Why early‑year drawdowns can be the best entry points

• Why paper trading builds confidence and discipline

But knowing what LEAPs are is only the beginning.

The real edge comes from knowing how to identify LEAP opportunities, how to manage it — and that’s where the paid section begins.

Read more

But LEAP options flip that mindset on its head.

They reward the investor who understands a simple truth: the best time to buy long‑term conviction is when the market is uncomfortable. LEAPs don’t require perfect timing. They don’t require you to predict the bottom. They simply require you to recognize that pain creates opportunity.

Why Pain Creates the Best LEAP Setups

When the market is stressed, premiums fall, implied volatility resets, and long‑dated calls become cheaper relative to the upside they offer. That’s the window where LEAPs shine.

Three structural advantages make LEAPs uniquely powerful in these moments:

1. You buy time — years of it

A LEAP gives your thesis room to breathe. You’re not trading the next earnings report or the next CPI print. You’re trading the trajectory of a company over 18–36 months. When the market is panicking about the next two weeks, you’re positioning for the next two years.

2. You control 100 shares with far less capital

Instead of tying up thousands of dollars in stock, you can express the same long‑term conviction with a fraction of the cost. That leverage isn’t about gambling but instead efficiency. It lets you participate in the upside without overexposing your portfolio.

3. Volatility becomes opportunity, not a threat

Short‑term swings that scare most investors become irrelevant noise. A LEAP thrives on the idea that temporary pain doesn’t change long‑term fundamentals. When volatility knocks a stock down, your cost basis improves. When it rebounds, your leverage kicks in.

This is why LEAPs are most attractive during market discomfort, not after it.

The Lesson That Cost Me $4,000

In early 2025, I bought LEAPs on SOFI.

The stock had been beaten down. Sentiment was weak. People were frustrated, bored, or outright bearish. But the fundamentals were improving, guidance was strong, and the long‑term story was intact. It was classic “pain now, gain later” territory.

And it worked, fast.

My LEAPs ran up, and in November, I was sitting on a $4,000 profit. I had literally watched the LEAP structure do exactly what it was designed to do:

• Turn volatility into opportunity

• Amplify long‑term upside

• Reward patience during discomfort

I didn’t sell. The profit evaporated. And that part stung.

But the lesson didn’t.

I saw firsthand how LEAPs can create real money, not hypotheticals, not backtests, not theory. Real dollars. Real upside. Real leverage on long‑term conviction.

That experience is why I still use LEAPs today. Not recklessly. Not constantly. But strategically, especially when the market is in pain.

How I Choose My LEAP Options:

If you already understand calls and puts, you’re in the perfect position to start using LEAPs tactically. Here’s the framework I use: It’s simple, disciplined, and built for real‑world execution.

1. Identify companies with improving fundamentals

You’re not buying hype. You’re buying trajectory.
SOFI in early 2025 is a perfect example: rising revenue, improving margins, strong guidance.

2. Wait for discomfort

Pullbacks. Red weeks. Fear. Boredom.
These are your moments. LEAPs are most attractive when the market is least enthusiastic.

3. Choose expirations 12–36 months out

This gives your thesis time to play out without rushing the clock.

4. Pick strikes near the money

Not lottery tickets. Not moonshots.
You want a payoff that naturally accelerates as the stock rises.

5. Size small, think big

LEAPs are powerful. You don’t need to overexpose yourself.
A few well‑chosen contracts can move your portfolio meaningfully.

Example: Pain → Opportunity → Growth

Imagine SOFI drops from $32 to $16 on market-wide fear. Fundamentals haven’t changed. Guidance is still strong. The long-term story is intact.

A 2028 LEAP call might fall from $12.00 to $3.00.

That’s pain.

But it’s also opportunity.

If SOFI returns to $32–$36 over the next year, that same LEAP could double or triple, without you needing to time the bottom or predict the exact reversal.

This is the essence of LEAPs:
You turn temporary pain into long‑term gain.

The Mindset Shift

Most investors think in days. LEAP investors think in years.

Most investors fear volatility. LEAP investors use it.

Most investors wait for comfort. LEAP investors step in during discomfort.

The market rewards the mindset that can endure short‑term pain for long‑term upside. LEAPs are simply the tool that makes that mindset actionable.

Final Thought

You don’t need to be perfect. You don’t need to time bottoms. You don’t need to predict the next CPI print.

You just need to recognize when the market is uncomfortable, and have the discipline to act when others hesitate.

That’s the power of LEAP options.
That’s why pain becomes opportunity.
And that’s why viewing pain as future gain isn’t just a title, it’s a strategy.

Subscribe for my exclusive options trades!

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Share Growth Without Regrets

The Baby Steps are one of the most recognizable financial frameworks in America. Millions of people have used them to get out of debt, build savings, and create structure in a part of life that often feels overwhelming. Dave Ramsey built a system that is simple, memorable, and effective for a huge number of people who need clarity more than anything.

I respect the impact the Baby Steps have had, but I also believe they were created for a very different economic environment than the one we live in today. Prices are higher, incomes are more volatile, and the path to financial stability looks nothing like it did when this plan first became popular. The original steps still hold value, but they also have limitations that become obvious once you look at them through a modern lens.

In this article, I am going to walk through each of the seven Baby Steps, explain what the original version teaches, and share my honest take on where I agree, where I disagree, and how I would update the framework for today’s world. My goal is not to tear down a system that has helped millions of people. My goal is to show you how to take the strengths of the Baby Steps and rebuild them into something more realistic, more flexible, and more aligned with the financial landscape we are actually living in.

By the end, you will see the full picture: the original Baby Steps as they were written, my perspective on each one, and the updated version I believe works better for this generation of earners.

Baby Step One

Save $1,000 for a starter emergency fund

Dave Ramsey’s first step is built around one idea. Most people live so close to the edge that even a small unexpected expense pushes them back into debt. A starter emergency fund creates enough breathing room to break that cycle and gives you the confidence to move into the next step without relying on credit cards every time something goes wrong.

My Take

The logic behind this step is strong, but the number is no longer realistic. One thousand dollars does not stretch very far in today’s economy. A single car repair, medical bill, or missed paycheck can wipe it out instantly. If the goal is to create real breathing room, the amount needs to reflect the world we are living in now.

I believe the modern version of this step should be a five thousand dollar starter fund kept in a high yield savings account. It is still a manageable target, but it actually protects you from the kinds of emergencies people face today. It also gives you enough stability to avoid falling back into debt the moment life surprises you.

Reaching this amount requires intention. Your starter fund has to be part of your budget, something you contribute to every paycheck rather than something you hope will appear on its own. Once you reach that first five thousand, you can move on to building a full emergency fund of at least three months of living expenses.

Baby Step Two

Pay off all debt except the house

The second Baby Step is where Ramsey asks people to eliminate every loan and credit card balance they have, one by one, until nothing is left except the mortgage. The method he teaches is the debt snowball, which means paying off debts from smallest to largest regardless of interest rates. The goal is psychological momentum. Once you clear the first balance, you feel progress, and that progress becomes fuel.

My Take

My first reaction to this step is simple. Not all debt is bad. Debt can be used to start a business, invest in real estate, or create opportunities that would not exist otherwise. Treating every form of debt as the enemy ignores the reality that some debt can be productive and strategic.

With that said, I understand why the debt snowball works. There is real power in checking balances off your list and seeing immediate progress. The psychological boost matters, especially for people who feel overwhelmed. Ramsey is right that every extra dollar in your budget should go toward eliminating bad debt, especially loans tied to depreciating assets like cars. Living below your means to remove that kind of debt is a smart move.

As a college student with loans at different interest rates, I have learned that the avalanche method can be more efficient. Paying off the highest interest rate first saves more money over time and reduces the total cost of your debt. For people who already have discipline and do not need the emotional momentum of the snowball, the avalanche method is the better strategy.

The truth is that both approaches have value. The snowball builds confidence. The avalanche builds efficiency. The best method depends on your situation, your personality, and the type of debt you are carrying.

Baby Step Three

Save three to six months of expenses

The third Baby Step is designed to protect you from the kind of financial shock that can undo months of progress. Ramsey teaches that a fully funded emergency fund turns a crisis into an inconvenience. It keeps you from sliding back into debt when life throws something unexpected your way. This step is about stability, confidence, and the ability to move forward without fear.

My Take

I agree with the heart of this step. A three to six month emergency fund is one of the most important financial foundations you can build. It gives you the freedom to handle job loss, medical bills, or unexpected expenses without relying on credit. I also appreciate the emphasis on budgeting. Completing this step requires more discipline than the first one. It takes a real plan, consistent habits, and a willingness to make sacrifices over time.

I want to emphasize one point. This money needs to sit in a high yield savings account. The goal is safety and liquidity, not chasing returns. You want this fund to be accessible the moment you need it.

I also agree with customizing the size of your emergency fund. If you have a steady salary, three months is usually enough. If your income varies or depends on commissions, six months is a better target. The key is building a cushion that fits your life, not someone else’s.

This step takes time, but it is worth every bit of effort. Once it is in place, you feel a level of stability that changes the way you make decisions. It becomes your own version of Murphy’s Law repellent, turning what used to be moments of crisis into inconveniences.

Baby Step Four

Invest 15% of your income for retirement

Ramsey’s fourth step is where you shift from protecting your finances to growing them. The idea is simple. Once you have a full emergency fund and no consumer debt, you begin investing 15% of your gross income into retirement accounts. Ramsey emphasizes consistency over complexity. Invest the same amount every month, avoid chasing trends, and let time and compounding do the heavy lifting. He recommends spreading investments across four types of growth stock mutual funds and keeping a long term perspective.

My Take

I agree with the core of this step. Investing 15% of your income is a strong foundation for long term financial stability. The part I want to highlight is the importance of taking full advantage of your employer match. If your employer offers matching contributions through a 401k or 403b, capturing that match is one of the highest return decisions you can make. It is free money and it accelerates your progress immediately.

After securing the employer match, I believe the next priority should be maxing out a Roth IRA. The annual contribution limit of $7,500 is one of the most valuable opportunities available to individual investors. The combination of tax free growth and tax free withdrawals in retirement makes it one of the best long term decisions you can make.

If your income allows you to invest beyond that, opening a brokerage account gives you the flexibility to buy index funds or a small number of individual stocks you understand well. I believe in a disciplined, index‑fund‑focused approach for retirement, but I also see value in owning a few individual stocks inside a Roth IRA or brokerage account when done intentionally.

There is one area where I differ from Ramsey. He teaches that you should not begin investing until all non‑mortgage debt is paid off. In my situation, I have student loans, and I will have them for a while. I also understand the importance of starting early so compounding can work in your favor. Beginning to invest at 18 gives you decades of growth that you cannot get back later. For that reason, I believe it is reasonable to start investing while still carrying student loans, especially if the interest rates are manageable and you have a plan to pay them down over time.

The heart of this step is consistency. Whether you invest through employer plans, a Roth IRA, or a brokerage account, the goal is to build a long term habit that compounds over decades. Slow, steady investing will always outperform emotional decision making.

Baby Step Five

Start saving for your child’s college fund

The fifth Baby Step shifts the focus from your financial foundation to your child’s future. Ramsey encourages parents to begin saving early so their children can avoid student loans and enter adulthood without the weight of debt. He highlights two main tools for this goal, Educational Savings Accounts and five twenty nine plans, both of which allow money to grow tax free when used for qualified education expenses. The purpose is simple. Planning ahead gives your child options and protects them from repeating the same debt cycle many families struggle with.

My Take

I agree with the heart of this step. Saving for your child’s education is one of the most meaningful financial gifts you can give. Starting early matters, and I believe the best time to begin is the moment you find out your partner is pregnant. Those extra months of compounding make a real difference over an eighteen year period.

If you invest $2,000 a year from birth to age eighteen, your child could have more than $100,000 dollars available for education. That amount can change the trajectory of their life. At the same time, I understand that saving $2,000 a year is not realistic for everyone, especially in your early or mid twenties. Even $500-1,000 a year is a strong start. You can increase contributions as your income grows and your financial situation becomes more stable.

The key is consistency. Whether you use an Educational Savings Account or a 529 plan, starting early and contributing regularly gives your child a real chance to begin adulthood without the burden of student loans. It is one of the few financial decisions that benefits both you and the next generation.

Baby Step Six

Pay off your home early

The sixth Baby Step is where Ramsey encourages people to begin making extra payments toward their mortgage once they are already investing for retirement and saving for their children’s education. The idea is to eliminate the largest payment in your budget so your income becomes fully available for building wealth. Ramsey also warns against relying on the tax deduction as a reason to keep a mortgage, arguing that paying interest simply to save a smaller amount on taxes is not a smart trade. The step is built around intentionality, discipline, and the belief that owning your home outright creates a level of freedom that changes your entire financial future.

My Take

There is a lot I appreciate about this step. The idea of eliminating your largest monthly payment is powerful. The emotional relief of owning your home outright is real, and the long term stability it creates cannot be ignored. I also like the emphasis on maintaining your retirement contributions and college savings while working toward this goal. It reinforces the idea that paying off your home should not come at the expense of your future.

At the same time, this step receives more pushback today than it did when the Baby Steps were first created, and some of those critiques are worth considering.

One modern argument is that inflation works in your favor when you have fixed debt. If inflation is running at three or four percent and your mortgage rate is also around that level, the real cost of borrowing becomes very low. In that environment, some people ask why they should rush to pay off a loan that inflation is quietly reducing for them. Ramsey’s framework does not fully account for these macroeconomic dynamics.

Another important consideration is liquidity. Modern financial planning places a high value on flexibility. Extra payments toward a mortgage are illiquid. Once the money is locked into the walls of your home, you cannot access it without selling the property, taking out a home equity line of credit, or refinancing. Each of those options introduces friction, cost, and risk. A more modern approach might be to build a larger cash buffer or a stronger brokerage account before committing thousands of dollars to additional mortgage payments.

I still believe paying off your home early can be a great goal, but it should not be treated as a universal rule. It depends on your interest rate, your income stability, your investment opportunities, and your personal comfort with liquidity. For some people, this step creates freedom. For others, it restricts flexibility. The key is understanding which category you fall into before committing to this path.

Baby Step Seven

Build wealth and give generously

The final Baby Step is where Ramsey encourages people to enjoy the freedom they have created. With no debt and a paid‑off home, your income becomes fully available for giving, investing, and enjoying life. Ramsey emphasizes generosity, simple wealth building, and the idea that financial peace allows you to bless others in ways you could not before. This step is meant to be the reward for years of discipline and sacrifice.

My Take

I agree with this step, especially the emphasis on giving. Generosity is one of the most meaningful uses of money, and supporting your church through tithing is an important part of that. I believe giving ten percent of your income to the church you attend is not only an act of faith but also a reminder that your money is not truly your own. It is the Lord’s first, and honoring Him with your finances sets the tone for everything else you do.

Where I differ from Ramsey is the placement of this step. I do not believe giving should be the final stage of your financial life. It should be the first. Generosity is not something you wait to practice until you reach a certain level of wealth. It is a discipline that shapes your heart and your habits from the beginning. When giving becomes step one, everything else in your financial life becomes more grounded, more intentional, and more aligned with your values.

I also appreciate the encouragement to keep building wealth, but I believe the tools can be broader than mutual funds and debt‑free real estate. Once you reach a strong financial position, you have the freedom to explore different investment opportunities, support causes you care about, and enjoy the fruits of your discipline. The goal is not just to accumulate money but to steward it well, give generously, and live with purpose.

Baby Step Seven is a reminder that money is a tool. It is not the point. The point is what you do with it, who you help, and how you honor the blessings you have been given.

Thank you for reading and taking the time to hear my perspective on Dave Ramsey’s seven Baby Steps. If you want more content like this, consider subscribing so you never miss a new breakdown or analysis.

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