Beaten-Down Fintechs, Broken Charts, and the Two Screens I Trust
How to compare FOUR, PYPL, and TOST plus others.
This was a fun one to build out. It took some time, but what I produced is a must use framework if you invest in, are interested in, or want to understand fintech & payments.
At some point in your investing career you find yourself back in the fintech & payments space, even if you swore you were done with it.
It usually starts with something credible. You know, a recommendation from someone you respect of a post on X. Maybe a note from someone who has been early, wrong, right, and early again. Let’s say it’s Michael Burry, a welcome voice on Substack. Thoughtful, independent, real work behind the call, and with battle scars and a notorious big win or two. He flags FOUR. You don’t dismiss it. You slow down and take it seriously, because why not.
On the surface, it holds together. The valuation looks reasonable. The business sounds coherent. The logic isn’t sloppy.
Then you zoom out.
The stock is sitting below its 200-week moving average and it looks like absolute death. The daily chart looks even worse. Wait, I’m supposed to buy this?
You start asking questions that don’t line up cleanly. Is this actually a payments company, or software with payments attached. Should revenue be the anchor here, or gross profit. Does free cash flow tell you anything useful once stock-based compensation is stripped out. Is Rule of 40 relevant in this model. Is the growth rate healthy, or just less bad than last year. And how do you compare this to PYPL, to TOST, to AFRM, without pretending they are the same business.
This is where fintech pulls disciplined investors out of rhythm and confuses everyone. And if you’re a CFA you probably get tied up like a pretzel in pro formas, narratives, and adjusted EBITDA targets.
Most fintech screens look clean, the outputs are tidy and all. But the conclusions drift. Growth looks fine, then confusing, then contradictory. And price refuses to cooperate. Am I supposed to look at fundamentals or technicals? And when do I buy?
Read on to find out …
Some housekeeping first: the Victaurs Vault will be up and live officially on 2/28. The Vault is my direct solution to the “Retail Gap”, the massive disadvantage individual investors and small funds face against institutional machines. It solves the “Data Chaos” problem where filings, transcripts, and notes are scattered everywhere by centralizing them into a single, organized source of truth. I’m also bridging the “Access Gap” by providing high-level, systematic research that is usually gated behind $20k-a-year terminals. Finally, I’m solving the “Time Gap”; there simply isn’t enough time in the day to perform deep research on every ticker manually. The Vault’s goal is to solve all three by giving you a place to operate in a self-serve way, using the same AI-powered research infrastructure I use to move from raw data to high-conviction ideas in minutes or hours instead of days. It’ll contain my momentum screens, my “get up to speed” write-ups, and the synthesized output of my personal research principles.
On 2/28, when it goes live, all paid members of record (currently $505 annually or $55 a month) will receive access. From that point on, the Vault becomes exclusive to the Founding Tier at $888. Select paid members are getting “Beta Access” this weekend or next to help battle-test the system before the doors officially open.
