News of the Week (July 7-11, 2025)

News of the Week (July 7-11, 2025)

13 min read

The slow season is over and earnings season starts next week! There are about 40 reviews to catch up on from last season, and I cannot wait to publish 40 more in the coming weeks.

To access my current portfolio & performance vs. the S&P 500, click here.

I’ve been doing weekly podcasts with two colleagues. I’m going to start sharing the links to those for investors who want to listen/watch. The latest episode can be found here. Topics include Tesla, Google, SoFi and Nvidia. The 2nd most recent episode can be found here.

Table of Contents

1. SoFi (SOFI) – Miscellaneous News

Anthony Noto conducted a brief interview with CNBC this past week. In it, he shared excitement about expansion into private market investments and how the new federal budget will support continued normalization in student loan refinance demand. There’s zero additional forgiveness coming and borrowers will need to make payments this year. This past week, the Department of Education announced that interest accruing for many borrowers and monthly payments for many more will resume in a few weeks. It’s so easy to see how they’ll flock to refinancing options to lower their payments. And? SoFi has a 60%+ market share of this refinance demand within its credit buckets. Most Noto-bly (sorry, couldn’t resist), he reiterated expectations for 30%+ member and product growth going forward. That bodes very well for Q2 results and updated 2025 guidance coming in a couple weeks.

Next, SoFi added more investment funds that provide access to private companies like OpenAI, SpaceX, Epic Games and many more. The funds include Cashmere (high-growth strategy), Fundrise (real estate and venture capital access) and Liberty Street Advisors (partners with seasoned fund managers to provide structured private market access). This follows a Templum partnership that initially unlocked access to high-profile private firms like SpaceX late last year.

In other news, SoFi’s GenAI banking assistant (Konecta) is yielding encouraging results for customers. Per a new press release, clients are enjoying 65% faster response times and 50% lower chat abandonment rates. That’s how you create real value and drive real traction for your products. Monetization follows utility.

2. Meta (META) – Wearables & AI

Meta bought a nearly 3% stake in EssilorLuxottica for $3.5B this past week. The two are close partners on the Ray-Ban Sunglasses, and now they’ll presumably get even closer. Direct ownership in the company provides Meta more flexibility to iterate more freely and frequently. It should expedite the product roadmap via improved collaboration and asset sharing between the two companies. Bank of America came out with a note saying large traction for this hardware (which is already clearly building) is probably not priced into the stock and could yield multiple expansion as it comes. They’re excited about that and, like me, also excited about Meta creating less dependence on Apple hardware for its own distribution.

Meta is also reportedly using Antrhopic’s Sonnet models for coding instead of its own Llama models. This offers more evidence of Meta perhaps falling a bit behind in the model race. That’s why it’s spending so aggressively to hire world class talent away from Apple, Alphabet, Anthropic and OpenAI and why Alexandr Wang was put in charge of Meta’s AI endeavors. Along those lines, it just hired the head of Apple’s AI teams (Ruoming Pang) for a $200M comp package. I’m sure the majority of that is tied to equity and performance. Some thought this meant he’d be getting an annual check for $200M and that’s just not the case. I continue to think LLM providers will constantly leapfrog one another over the coming years. Right now, X and Alphabet are considered the leaders, with X’s brand new release leading ranking boards and Gemini’s upcoming release most likely reclaiming that lead. I’m quite confident that Meta will continue to effectively innovate in the space as well. I view modest Llama 4 disappointment as an anomaly, with the company’s obsessive founder determined to make sure it doesn’t recur. Not ideal but motivation for a somewhat crazy and world-class founder/CEO is a beautiful thing. This is not overly concerning to me either.

3. Mercado Libre (MELI) & Nu (NU) – Tariffs & More

There’s a new 50% tariff looming for Brazil that was just announced by the U.S. administration. From a direct point of view, Mercado Libre and Nu are not vulnerable to these taxes and their cost structure won’t materially change. Nu has no import/export business and so will not be paying these tariffs if they remain in place. Mercado Libre does not source goods from Brazil to export to the USA. They have one USA fulfillment center, but that’s used to service U.S. sellers shipping goods to Mexico specifically… not the other way around and not predominantly to Brazil (which matched the USA’s 50% tariff). From this perspective, the news is irrelevant for both companies.

But? There is a potential indirect headwind. Tariffs could lower demand for Brazilian goods, as well as impact that consumer, economy and currency too. Neither of these companies is immune to worsening macro, so both would suffer to a certain degree. For context, total Brazilian exports to the U.S. in 2024 were roughly $40 billion, with the total economy at $2.33 trillion.  That is a roughly 2% hit if the entire export cohort vanishes (which it won’t).

At the same time, that suffering would likely be ephemeral if these new tariffs even stick. The companies would endure slower growth, but would keep taking market share, fortifying their moats and preparing for faster expansion as soon as macro once again brightens. Tariffs would not impact the long-term investment case or the relative value propositions for these companies, and I’d likely use any material sell-offs stemming from them to add to these positions.

Separately, S&P Global upgraded Mercado Libre credit to BBB- yesterday. MELI is officially investment grade in the eyes of that firm with a stable outlook. That will be great for its future cost of capital.

4. Alphabet (GOOGL) – Bullish Search Data & More

Oppenheimer published a bullish survey on Alphabet’s AI Search products as part of an outperform rating reiteration this week. The survey included 1,416 U.S. adults and focused on their usage of and satisfaction with AI Mode. The results bode very well for Alphabet:

  • 60% of respondents found it more valuable than ChatGPT.
  • Of the 263 respondents who are paid ChatGPT users, 75% of them find Google’s free AI Mode to be more useful.
  • 53% of respondents click an AI Mode link often or very often. Great news for monetization.
  • 65% of AI Mode users are downloading Gemini.
  • AI Mode makes it less likely for respondents to pay for an AI agent.
  • ChatGPT and Gemini are by far the two most popular chatbot products.

Separately, Oppenheimer sees Waymo (self-driving cars) compounding at a 100% clip over the next 5 years to reach $12.5B in total revenue. That’s when that unit is supposed to breakeven from an EBITDA perspective. By 2035, it expects Waymo to be doing $25B in annual EBITDA, representing a high-single-digit percentage of total profitability.