Summary
- The great financial crisis catalysed a large shift in the consumption of financial products away from traditional firms.
- Firms like SoFi stand to benefit from this as growing consumer adoption of digital financial products is a tailwind that will play out over the next decade.
- SoFi's has differentiated itself and claimed a stake in this future by building a platform that serves the needs of its customers.
- Flying shopping cart with shopping bags on a pink background
Buying the dip can fast become mired in even more capital destruction when a stock keeps on dipping. The ominous warning to not try to catch a falling knife holds true here as the bottom can only ever be truly known in retrospect. To be clear here, I think SoFi (NASDAQ:SOFI) is going to keep on dipping. This will be on the back of an absence of a catalyst and as this torrid year fully plays out. As mentioned in my previous article, this weakness is due to the amalgamation of a number of factors that will likely persist for a while.
For the sake of transparency, I aim to control at least 2,500 shares going into 2022. This will be up from 1,000 currently and will hopefully be at a cost average lower than $15 but currently sits higher at $15.78. Hence, the title. The more SoFi falls the more I buy. Critically, this allows me to accumulate more shares at a lower cost average in a company included in the apex of the world's largest economy's shift to digital financial services. The opportunity is truly being underrated by the market.
The 2008 global financial crisis was a watershed moment in Western banking as too big to fail banks failed and trust in the traditional financial orthodoxy was broken. For a new generation of people growing up in the period after the largest economic collapse in a generation, there had to be alternatives. And while this is now in the rearview, the GFC birthed fintech firms like SoFi who have positioned themselves to ride the wave of growing consumer adoption of fintech.
SoFi Versus The Great Unbundling Of Financial Services
American consumers currently face intensely siloed choices for financial products. This means that there is a dependency on a plethora of different app and companies for financial products ranging from loans and credit cards to insurance, wealth management, and savings.
It's understandable as these all have material TAMs worth north of $2 trillion annually. A sobering fact that has understandably allowed an endless amount of VC money to flow into new firms promising to disrupt a specific stratum of the broader financial services economy.
SoFi differs from this zeitgeist as it aims to build a singular platform in a strong attempt to serve all the financial needs of its members. The stakes could not be higher. This is a land grab with the winners standing to take most of the value. When fintech eventually matures, what's left standing will be the companies with intense scale and most of the consumers. In this sense, SoFi's strategy to build a super-platform to bundle disparate financial products simultaneously exposes them to multi-hundred billion dollar TAMs which aggregate to create immense downstream revenue.
This has meant the company guiding for a 43% 5-year compound annual growth from fiscal 2020. SoFi expects 2025 revenue of no less than $3.67 billion, with the most dramatic growth coming from its financial products and Galileo. While it is hard to forecast future market sentiment, an 8x to 12x price to sales multiple as at the end of 2025 would not be beyond the realms of prudence and would see the company's market cap trade up significantly from its current value of $12.11 billion.
Looking Forward To 2022
The continually extended student loan moratorium which paused federal student loan payments and temporarily set the federal student loan interest rate to 0% is set to expire on January 31, 2022. While another extension was ruled out, this was before the emergence of the Omicron variant. Hence, there is a risk that this date is pushed back yet again as the White House is currently being pressured to take such an action due to the economic uncertainty posed. This is a salient risk that shareholders need to be aware of as it would represent a potent reduction of a huge driver of upside for the next year.
Buying The Dip As This Volatility Is Likely The Price Of Longer-Term Alpha
2021 has not been a great year for growth investors as dip-buying throughout the year failed to pay off with a selloff that worsened in November. The number of times I bought the dip this year across a number of growth stocks only to see it dip further felt comical at some points.
However, I understand that this volatility is the price of potential alpha and nothing good goes up in a straight line. While I don't think there will be an immediate respite going into 2022, SoFi is one to hold for years, not months. For fundamentally driven investors, any further dips would likely be welcome.