Most people look at SoFi today and assume the move was obvious.

They see the revenue beats.
They see the margin expansion.
They see the acceleration in earnings.

But when I first bought SoFi, none of that was happening.

The stock was hated.
The narrative was wrong.
And the people talking about it were the ones who understood it the least.

My first buy on SoFi was at $5.
Not because I was chasing a chart.
Not because I got lucky on timing.
But because I saw a business-model inflection the market hadn’t recognized yet.

Everyone else saw a student-loan refi app.
I saw something completely different.

SoFi’s turning point wasn’t a headline or a quarter.
It wasn’t the bank charter.
It wasn’t deposits or rates or APYs.

It was the moment SoFi quietly finished assembling a vertically integrated financial operating system — long before the Street modeled it correctly.

They had:

When you control the entire stack, you control:

That’s when I knew the market was mispricing the entire company.

And that’s why I bought it at $5.

Most people fixated on short-term noise:

I wasn’t looking at any of that.

I was looking at unit economics and business architecture — the stuff that actually determines a company’s destination 3–5 years out.

Here’s the exact inflection point I saw:

Traditional banks rent everything:
software, underwriting, servicing, user acquisition, credit models, payment rails.

SoFi built everything.

That’s not a fintech story — that’s a platform story.

Platforms scale differently.
Platforms monetize differently.
Platforms break old models.

This was the first tell.

Relay → Money → Credit → Invest.

Every product made the next one cheaper to acquire.
Every data point improved underwriting.
Every cross-sell expanded margins.

People said SoFi needed to “prove” cross-sell.

The numbers said it was already happening.

While people argued about student loans, SoFi quietly launched the Loan Platform Business:

LPB wasn’t a product.
It was an entire revenue engine the Street hadn’t modeled.

This was the second tell.

Analysts were projecting profitability years out.

I could already see:

This is why I didn’t care that the stock was unloved.

The operating model was shifting before consensus realized it.

And that’s where asymmetric returns live.

I mention the $5 entry for one reason — not to brag, but to make a point about process.

I didn’t buy SoFi at $5 because the stock looked cheap.
I bought it at $5 because the business was undervalued relative to its trajectory.

This is the exact same lens I bring to Alpha 40K today:

This is the same framework that got me into:

I don’t chase narratives.
I chase inflections.

And SoFi at $5 was one of the clearest inflections I’ve ever seen.

The market thought SoFi was a student-loan company trying to become a bank.

What I actually bought was a vertically integrated financial infrastructure platform becoming something Wall Street hadn’t modeled yet.

That wasn’t luck.

That was pattern recognition.

And it’s the exact same pattern recognition I’m using for every position inside Alpha 40K.

The next post in this series drops tomorrow — HIMS.

— Connor
Alpha Before It Prints

For anyone wondering how this framework translates into actual positioning:

I run two live portfolios that reflect two very different parts of my thinking.

The Black Sheep Base Case Portfolio is exactly what it sounds like — core positioning for how I expect the broader market to resolve when structure matters more than headlines.

The Alpha Framework Portfolio is different.

That’s where I take long-term swings on smaller companies I believe can materially outperform over full cycles — names that usually look wrong before they look obvious.

A few past examples from that framework:

No alerts.
No perfection.
A lot of patience.

That’s not a promise — it’s just context for how I think and how I size risk.

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