SoFi Just Made 2 SNEAKY Buyouts — Everything We Know...

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]We just got some breaking news for SoFi because in the past 72 hours, they just confirmed two acquisitions and one of them they've never actually even announced. And on top of that, we also got another CEO purchase from Anthony Notto. He's been buying stock throughout this entire thing. In this video, I'm going to be talking about these acquisitions as well as what's been going on with SoFi over the past week or so. Let's jump right in.

[00:00:23]Okay, so I'm going to talk first and foremost about some technical patterns, about some analysts ratings and what's been going on with SoFi. And then I also want to talk in depth around my thoughts with regards to these acquisitions. So was up 3 and a.5% today in trading. And if we look on a past weekly view, it's been pretty flat down. Sentiment as well is pretty low for SoFi right now. And over the past week, we also got analysts lowering their price targets. Some of them are the most bullish analysts on the street for SoFi. So for example, here you have Dan Dolev for Mizuo. He had one of the highest targets on the street at $38 and he lowered that after Q1 earnings to $29, keeping an outperform rating on the shares. Mizuo said they updated their company model post the report. Mizuo views the print as solid, saying member growth remained robust, but it reduced the estimates for the company's 2026 and 2027 years. Now, one thing to keep in mind before you guys get angry at analysts is that the stock is currently trading for like 16 bucks. For the fact that Mizuo still has a price target that's nearly double where the stock is today, it's still incredibly bullish. But a $38 price target might have been fine when the stock was at $30, but at these prices, that's going to stick out. We also saw City lower their price target here from $37 down to $30. They kept their buy rating on the shares. They cited the Q1 report was strong. It cites multiple compression in the lending technology space for the target cut. And this is not an isolated story. Overall across the board, we are seeing price targets go down for SoFi. Morgan Stanley reduced it. Needm reduced it. UBS, KBW, Bank of America, TD Cohen, so on and so forth.

[00:02:05]Because as we know the price targets are going to follow the stock price to a certain degree and the stock price as well as the sentiment is at rock bottom levels. And we can see here from a technical perspective, I mean, the stock is in a pullback from the $32 range where it peaked out in the fall down to the $156 range where it ended up after the Q1 earnings. However, if we look at the institutional ownership for SoFi, that's going up and to the right. And every single month, that institutional ownership profile becomes even more and more compelling because large institutions are piling into the stock at relatively low levels, especially because the stock is down 50% since their highs. Now, let me talk first and foremost about this primary acquisition.

[00:02:46]So, this is Composer. Here you have a little write up uh and I I'll talk a little bit about some of my research on Composer as well. SoFi acquired two entities here. They acquired Composer Technologies, which is the platform, the IP, and they acquired Composer Securities. So, this is an SEC registered broker dealer. This was confirmed through FINRA's broker check.

[00:03:07]And if you were to look at FINRA's broker check, SoFi Technologies is now listed as a sole shareholder with over 75% ownership of this company. This deal effectively closed in March of 2026. So this is not recent. It's about 2 months old at this point and it was never announced publicly through a press release. It only surfaced because the FINRA filing updated publicly recently.

[00:03:31]The price here is not disclosed for Composer. Now, Composer here, if we go back to this post, this is a Toronto-based AI powered automated trading platform that was founded in 2020. It basically has a noode visual editor for building algorithmic trading strategies. It has a subscription product and it supports back testing across historical data. It has taxable accounts, Roth IRA, and it recently back in December 2025 launched option selling. The company was 29 employees and their last raise was 16.7 million.

[00:04:05]So this is a very very small company.

[00:04:08]This user here says that uh you get access to a local Canadian talent and market knowledge. So there's people that are asking right now whether Sofi intends to expand internationally into Canada, but realistically there's some limitations. There's big regulatory barriers. Canada has strict rules for brokerage. Uh composer is only US regulated and there's no current plans announced for uh Canada expansion. I honestly don't think that SoFi is going to expand into it to Canada. The juice is not worth the squeeze. However, having composer helps for a couple of reasons. Number one is it closes the biggest active gap in SoFi invest which is algorithmic trading implementing more AIdriven strategies uh back testing.

[00:04:49]These are the features that Robin Hood has. Even Weeble to a certain extent, the power users are looking for these types of features to level up that trading platform. And I think Sofi Invest is going to get much smarter into how they operate off the back of a company like Composer. It also adds a fully licensed broker dealer with options approval because you have instant infrastructure that SoFi would have taken years to build out organically. You have a subscription revenue model that could be packaged as SoFi Invest Premium or Pro across their entire 14.7 million member base. You have the Galileo parallel. So just as Galileo is a banking as a service platform and Technicus became the core banking layer, Composer could become the investing as a service platform for them to offer this out through Galileo to other fintech partners. And then you also have IRA support because most algorithmic platforms don't support tax advantaged accounts. So SoFi could actually get ahead of the pack from a feature set perspective with Composer because they're essentially acquiring that feature set. So this is acquisition number one. It's going to increase user engagement on SoFi Invest, especially now that they also have crypto back in SoFi Invest. It's going to attract a younger, more techsavvy demographic.

[00:06:00]It's going to strengthen SoFi's position in SoFi Invest as a leader in that fintech space. and it's going to give them speed to market because they don't have to build it out all inhouse organically. And on top of that, it's going to add an AI intelligence layer to the SoFi Invest platform. Now, acquisition number two was none other than Primary Bid. And this was just announced earlier today. And just as a recap, Primary Bid was a UK startup founded in 2016. It's a fintech company that aggregates retail investor orders into a single block for IPO and for capital raises. Now, this gained prominence during COVID when a lot of companies were essentially IPOing. It primary bid closed a 190 million series C round back in February of 2022. And the reason why this might sound familiar to a couple of viewers is because SoFi and Primary Bid were already in a partnership where they launched the direct share platform 2.0 together back in October of 2024. So essentially for offering IPO access to a lot of these new companies, SoFi partnered with Primary Bid and as of today they acquired the assets of Primary Bids directed share program. This was confirmed by a SoFi spokesperson to payments and we also saw Sky News and a whole bunch of other uh news outlets reporting this earlier today. Now notice was posted on Primary Bids website on Friday and Sky News reported it earlier today on Monday, May 11th. So, these are legitimate news networks and this is a pretty credible news source. So, we're going off of this. Although we have no official announcement from SoFi's PR team, nor from their IR page. Per this acquisition, most of Primary Bits assets go to SoFi. The company's independent status is ending, but the price was not disclosed of this acquisition. And of course, this is not a full buyout. This is most of their assets. And again with primary bid being UKbased the questions are surfacing whether an international play is the reason behind this acquisition. Now I think there's a couple of reasons why this matters strategically. Number one is it directly extends SoFi into capital markets infrastructure. This is something that they dip their toes in with the IPO access in 2024. But this allows them to go deeper. not just lending, not just banking, but now having IPO underwriting and retail allocation for future IPOs that are going to be upcoming. Number two is it's feebased revenue. And this is largely what the company has been pursuing through the course of 2025.

[00:08:31]These are services that earn fees, not capital intensive lending spreads, which has been traditionally SoFi's core business model. And number three is there's a Robin Hood comparable here because Robin Hood has a retail IPO access. So now has it plus they have the institutional issuer relationships that primary bid has already built up over time. Fourth, this helps them with regulatory tailwinds with regards to crypto. The Clarity Act vote is this week on Thursday. That's a Senate Banking Committee vote. Of course, it's going to pass the Senate vote. After that, we have tokenized IPO infrastructure that's coming online. You know, you have the securitized FINRA approval. You have a Circle IPO speculated to be in the mix sometime in 2026. If retailincclusive capital markets become the norm going forward, especially with some of these big high-profile IPOs, SoFi will now be positioned as the on-ramp to allowing their members to be parts of those IPOs in a bigger way. And then finally, this is a consolidation of an existing partnership that was set up since 2024.

[00:09:39]And by having it be that way, it's also offering a lower integration risk than a cold acquisition out of the blue because they're already integrated through their partnership. And so they have some speed to market from that perspective. I think overall if we look at the bigger picture here with these acquisitions both of them happening in 60 days of each other plus the existing Galileo and technus stack SoFi is the only consumer fintech on the market right now with vertical integration across lending banking payments core banking infrastructure investing and trading as well as capital markets. So they're well positioned across the entire stack to execute and compete. And on a larger note, this marketplace thesis that Noto has been telegraphing recently is now in play when you're buying up all of these pieces because it allows them to have speed to market. Robin Hood is the closest competitor on retail, but Robin Hood doesn't own a bank. It doesn't have a core banking platform. It doesn't have the IPO infrastructure. And this is essentially the moat from a capital markets perspective and from an IPO perspective. And not only that, but both of these are acquisitions in the invest space. And there's also a couple of other benefits that I'll highlight here.

[00:10:48]So this is Barlo's bow and he highlighted why this is massive for SoFi. So number one is this is going to further supercharge the investing flywheel with SoFi members getting access to hot IPOs and directed shares straight from their SoFi app which will lead to more engagement which will lead to more volume and ultimately more stickiness of the invest platform.

[00:11:06]Number two is it's a new high margin revenue stream by powering capital raises for companies going public. the platform fees, the expanded services, the cross-selling banking and lending to new corporate clients will give Sofi an advantage. Number three is it always gives them an foothold into the international expansion into the UK if that's the route that they so choose.

[00:11:28]And finally, number four is it's perfect timing. And this is what I was saying earlier. The IPO market is looking very hot for 2026. Some of the biggest names out there with Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceX, all looking to go public this year. and Sofa is going to be well positioned to take advantage of that.

[00:11:45]Now, one question that I'm for sure going to be asked as a result of this video is the fact that Anthony Notto has been buying shares. So, if we just take a look at the insider purchases that we've had over the past month, this is Paper Panda, by the way. Definitely check it out if you guys want a resource. Anthony Notto here has been consistently purchasing shares in May.

[00:12:05]If we actually go here and we filter by Anthony Notto, we can see all of his purchases. Anthonyto has never sold shares of SoFi. However, he has two buys in Q2 and he also had two buys in Q1 as well. He's been buying consistently throughout 20126. If we look at the buys here, we have one for May 11th, which was earlier today it was announced 15.5,000 shares at a price of $16 worth around $250,000.

[00:12:32]And he also bought on Friday on May 8th another $250,000 worth another 15,800 shares. He also bought twice on March as well. On March 17th, he bought 28,900 shares worth about $500,000. And on March 2nd, he bought a million dollar worth of SoFi stock on the open market. And as a reminder, Anthonyto owns about 12 million shares of SoFi. This is what his purchases have looked like. He's been buying in 2024 consistently when the stock price was in the low teens and in the single digits. And he stopped buying throughout 2025. and he's back and buying again in 2026 when the stock price has again fallen. He's about over 40 times since the company has gone public back in 2021. And as you can see, these are all the buys per quarter of Anthony. And he's not stopping anytime soon. So, he is very bullish on the stock. Now, one question that I'm for sure going to be asked as a result of this video is how is it possible that he is allowed to still be buying in light of these acquisitions? Because normally when a CEO has material non-public information, they're not allowed to buy.

[00:13:36]So how is this legal? Well, the first thing I'll say is that these acquisitions that we just talked about, they're not financially material.

[00:13:43]Composer raised 16.7 million lifetime.

[00:13:46]Primary bid was effectively distressed.

[00:13:49]I mean, uh, the London Stock Exchange Group wrote it down 87%. For a 20 billion market cap company doing 1.1 billion in quarterly revenue, having acquisitions that are under $50 million doesn't really move the needle.

[00:14:02]Materiality is a real legal test. And this doesn't meet it. So, it's not material non-public information. The material part is missing. Public companies are required to file 8Ks within four business days for any material acquisitions. Sofi's legal team made the call that neither of these deals cleared the bar to be considered material for the business. And if they did meet this bar and were deemed to be material, Noto wouldn't have been able to buy. So quite frankly, SoFi's legal team deemed that these acquisitions were just too small, not needed mover enough to be even announced in an 8K, nor to stop from buying. He's also buying in open trading windows. They're not in a blackout period right now because SoFi reported on April 29th and Notto bought on May 8th and he bought again on May 11th. So outside of that blackout window, the Composer deal already closed in March. So whatever non-public information existed is now public through FINRA. Primary bid was reported by Sky News and Reuters before we got the buy today. So it's public information already. So the pattern here is conviction in his purchases. It's not opportunistic. I mean, not has bought over a 100,000 shares in the past 12 months, disclosing through form fours within one business day, every single time. It's all very textbook and it survives any insider trading scrutiny that anybody online might bring up. If he were trading on material non-public information, he'd be using a 10B5 plan.

[00:15:29]He's not doing that. He's just buying on the open market and he believes that there's nothing he knows about that the market doesn't know about. So the takeaway here is that this is the clearest version of insider buying signal that you're going to get. And I think he's going to continue buying quite frankly because these acquisitions are all, you know, opportunistic.

[00:15:45]They're all tuckin acquisitions. They're all something that will give them a speed to market and a feature advantage across their competitor stack, but they're not so big that they're actually going to move the needle from a financial perspective as a standalone value proposition. But it's something that will over time differentiate them and dig them out deeper. So overall, the takeaway here is that SoFi is continuously executing. They're looking to make their invest platform better.

[00:16:07]They're looking to take advantage of these big IPOs and maybe they're opening the door for international expansion down the line. And of course, the CEO's purchases here are a clear signal that he believes the $15 to $16 is cheap. I mean, he said it flat out to even an interview with myself and Tanner back in February that he believes the true value of the company currently is in the high $30 range. So where it's trading right now is incredibly cheap. And I've even publicly said that SoFi should be buying back some of their shares right now because of how cheaply they're trading.

[00:16:36]But instead, these small acquisitions make a lot of strategic sense for the company and I think can set them apart.

[00:16:43]And we're going to see what types of dividends are paid off as a result of these acquisitions. And the other point that I find interesting is that back in Q1 earnings, they were asked around acquisitions. And the interesting part was Anthonyto responded by saying, "We're going to be opportunistic around acquisitions." and predominantly they were looking in the technology platform space to help enable the tech platform even further. It's funny that two acquisitions that they just announced are both in the SoFi invest space. So that's really an interesting observation as well to think about. But if you think about the entire stack as I laid it out, SoFi is ensuring that they have a defensible moat across the board when you put all the pieces of the puzzle together. Anyways, this is just my raw thoughts on these acquisitions. I will keep you guys posted. If you guys do have questions, then let me know in the comments below. Thank you all so much for watching. Definitely subscribe to the channel for more. I cover SoFi on a regular basis. I make videos about them every single week. Overall, despite the stock price, I'm very bullish on the prospects of the company going forward.

[00:17:40]Thanks again and I'll see you in the next one.