New York, June 22, 2026, 14:07 EDT
- SoFi Technologies (NASDAQ:SOFI) traded about 3.6% lower near $17.26 in Monday afternoon dealing, almost exactly where CEO Anthony Noto’s 2026 open-market buying average sits.
- The latest market story is not one clean catalyst: traders are weighing insider buying, a still-weak longer-term chart, and SoFi’s stablecoin push after Friday’s Juneteenth market closure.
- The underwatched variable is funding cost: SoFi said first-quarter deposits funded more than 90% of average liabilities, giving the stock a bank-style sensitivity that can get lost in fintech headlines.
Shares of SoFi Technologies (NASDAQ:SOFI) fell in Monday afternoon trading, giving back early June momentum as investors tested whether repeated insider buying can still steady a stock that has been weak for much of the year. The shares were recently around $17.26, down 65 cents, with intraday volume above 49 million shares.
The move matters now because the price is sitting almost on top of a quiet reference point: Noto’s 2026 open-market buying average. Benzinga reported on Monday that Noto has bought 130,211 shares this year at a blended average of about $17.29, including 13,888 shares in June at $18.06, and now holds roughly 11.96 million shares directly.
That turns the insider-buying story into something more mechanical than emotional. If SoFi holds the high-$16 to low-$17 zone, traders can keep treating management’s purchases as a floor of sorts. A clean break below it would blunt that signal and shift attention back to credit, valuation and deposit costs.
There was no single company shock behind the move. Monday was the first regular U.S. cash-equity session after Nasdaq was closed on June 19 for Juneteenth; regular Nasdaq hours are 9:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. ET. Benzinga said premarket traders were weighing a longer-term downtrend against Noto’s buying and SoFi’s crypto-adjacent product narrative.
The latest peer tape did not help. Affirm Holdings (NASDAQ:AFRM) was down about 1.6%, while Upstart Holdings (NASDAQ:UPST), another rate- and credit-sensitive fintech lender, fell about 3.5%.
The overlooked catalyst is less flashy than SoFiUSD, its bank-issued stablecoin. In the first quarter, SoFi said average deposits made up more than 90% of average total liabilities, and that deposit rates were 155 basis points below warehouse facilities — a basis point is one-hundredth of a percentage point — translating into about $621.8 million of annualized interest-expense savings. Net interest margin, the spread between what a lender earns on assets and pays for funding, rose 22 basis points from the prior quarter to 5.94%.
That is the part of the story many trading notes miss. SoFi is being valued like a high-growth fintech, but the near-term earnings lever is old-fashioned banking: keep deposits cheap, lend carefully, and avoid giving too much of the spread back to customers through promotional rates. The company relaunched SoFi Plus in April with a 4.5% APY on deposits up to $20,000, a customer-acquisition tool that also shows the cost of competing for sticky deposits.
Morningstar’s Michael Miller captured that tension last week, cutting SoFi’s fair value estimate to $17 from $19 while raising its economic moat rating to narrow, an analyst term for a durable competitive edge. The odd pairing — lower fair value, stronger moat — points to the real debate: SoFi’s deposit base and switching costs may be improving, but the stock has little room for disappointment near current levels.
SoFi’s own numbers still show strong execution. The company reported first-quarter net revenue of $1.1 billion, net income of $167 million, adjusted EBITDA of $340 million, and record total loan originations of $12.2 billion. Noto said the quarter showed “durable growth and strong returns,” helped by member and product gains. Q4 Capital
The product narrative is also real. SoFi said in May that SoFiUSD, a bank-issued U.S. dollar stablecoin, was available in its app for nearly 15 million members; Noto said SoFi could combine “the speed and versatility of the blockchain with the trust of a bank.” A stablecoin is a digital token designed to track a reference asset, usually the dollar, but SoFi’s own disclosure says digital assets are not FDIC insured, not bank guaranteed and may lose value. SoFi Technologies
But the setup can go wrong. If loan losses rise, deposit competition forces SoFi to pay more for funding, or regulators slow the digital-asset roadmap, the market may keep valuing the company more like a lender than a software platform. That is the downside case behind Monday’s fade: good growth is already visible, while the next rerating depends on proving the funding advantage can survive a tougher credit cycle.
