New York, July 13, 2026, 09:09 (EDT)
SoFi Technologies, Inc. NASDAQ:SOFI rose 2.8% to $19.31 in premarket trading on Monday, even as Nasdaq 100 futures fell 0.94% after renewed U.S.-Iran attacks pushed crude prices more than 3% higher. The split put the digital lender on the other side of the morning’s pressure on growth and technology shares.
SoFi had disclosed no fresh operating news over the weekend. Its investor-relations page listed a July 7 exchange-traded fund launch as its latest press release, while second-quarter results are scheduled for July 29. That makes the early move look more like pre-earnings positioning than a response to a new company event, though the cause cannot be confirmed from public trading data.
Short interest stood at 188.1 million shares, or 14.94% of the public float, as of June 30. Public float means shares available to public investors. With that much bearish exposure, short covering — traders buying back borrowed shares to close bets against the stock — can intensify a rise without saying much about its staying power.
Robinhood Markets NASDAQ:HOOD, a relevant comparison in retail investing, was down 0.54% at $111.37 at 9 a.m. ET. SoFi’s advance was therefore not a sectorwide brokerage bounce, although SoFi’s bank charter and large lending book make the comparison imperfect.
| Monday premarket check | Time | Price | Move |
|---|---|---|---|
| SoFi Technologies | 09:00 ET | $19.31 | +2.82% |
| Robinhood Markets | 09:00 ET | $111.37 | -0.54% |
| Nasdaq 100 futures | 06:58 ET | — | -0.94% |
The number with more staying power is $621.8 million. SoFi said deposits made up more than 90% of average liabilities in the first quarter and carried a rate 155 basis points below warehouse facilities, credit lines used to fund loans. A basis point is one-hundredth of a percentage point; SoFi annualized that cost gap at $621.8 million of interest-expense savings.
That funding edge still drives the story. Net interest income — interest earned minus interest paid — reached $693 million, or roughly 64% of the combined total of net interest income and fee-based revenue. Lending-segment revenue was about 8.6 times Technology Platform revenue, showing that SoFi’s current earnings engine looks more like a fast-growing digital bank than a financial-software vendor.
| Q1 2026 comparison | First measure | Second measure | Calculated relationship |
|---|---|---|---|
| Net interest income vs fee revenue | $693.0 million, +39% | $386.8 million, +23% | 64% vs 36% |
| Lending vs Technology Platform revenue | $642.4 million, +55% | $75.1 million, -27% | 8.6 times |
| Deposit vs warehouse funding rate | Deposits | Warehouse credit lines | Deposits 155 basis points cheaper |
The near-term hurdle is a planned step down in growth. Management expects second-quarter adjusted revenue to rise about 30%, versus 41% in the first quarter, and an adjusted EBITDA margin of about 30%, compared with 31%. Adjusted EBITDA is profit before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization, after additional company-specified exclusions; the full-year targets remain $4.655 billion of adjusted revenue, $1.6 billion of adjusted EBITDA and adjusted earnings of about 60 cents a share.
At $19.31, the stock was trading at roughly 32 times management’s 2026 adjusted earnings target. That forward multiple — the share price divided by expected annual profit — makes the quality of guidance nearly as important as the quarterly result. After the first-quarter report, William Blair analyst Andrew Jeffrey wrote that SoFi “did not flow through first-quarter revenue and EBITDA upside”; the shares fell 12% after the company kept its annual forecast unchanged. Reuters
New investment products could alter the mix over time. Discussing SoFi’s acquisition of automated-investing startup Composer, Chief Executive Anthony Noto told Reuters: “If you can explain an investment idea in plain English, you can now build, test, and automate it.” Robinhood has separately outlined plans to let customers deploy artificial-intelligence agents for trading, sharpening the contest for active investors. For now, SoFi’s reported numbers say lending, not software or brokerage, sets the stock’s main earnings sensitivity. Reuters
But the upside case can break if oil-driven inflation keeps interest rates high. SoFi may have to pay more for deposits while consumer losses rise; personal-loan annualized charge-offs were 3.03% in the first quarter, up from 2.80% in the prior quarter, and the company estimated a rate of about 4.4% excluding sales of loans already deep in delinquency. A merely in-line second quarter, paired with another unchanged full-year outlook, could bring a repeat of April’s sharp valuation reset.
Tuesday’s U.S. consumer-price report is the first checkpoint. The July 29 earnings release is the bigger one for SoFi: investors will be watching whether the deposit-cost gap holds, whether personal-loan losses remain controlled and whether fee and technology revenue can start carrying more of the load.
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