u/miguel_equivara

It's time to revisit Figma, I bought during the IPO frenzy after reading the S-1, it was trading around 50x+ sales and today it's ~5.8x forward, tbh it's cheap versus its own history

The business itself is hard to argue with cause Figma has became the operating system teams build inside, each new seat and product lands in the same account at almost no extra cost and because the whole org's work now lives on that shared system, leaving isn't just an easy software swap, it's retraining everyone and rebuilding everything. One account, more products every quarter, each one making the next easier to sell and the whole relationship harder to leave

That lock in is visible in the numbers:

• Net dollar retention up four straight quarters: 129% → 131% → 136% → 139%
• ~70% of customers on three or more products
• ~690k paid customers (+54% YoY), the $100K+ cohort up 48%

It also answered the bear case that crushed it. The fear during the SaaSpocalypse selloff and Claude Desing launch was that AI eats seat based pricing. Figma's response is to make AI usage credits on top of seats so more AI usage means more revenue, not less. The early data is showing most enterprise users who blew past their included credits kept paying for more, and teams that add credits spend 3x

The dip is real on price but GAAP profitability inflection does not look feasible in the short term: the GAAP loss is entirely stock compensation, but AI-inference costs are compressing margins and could push the GAAP inflection way into 2027 or 2028

If I buy, it's a <1% starter from my portfolio that earns its way up, full detailed analysis on my Substack for free: 

https://open.substack.com/pub/equivara/p/figma-now-that-the-ipo-hype-is-gone?r=8g3sj2&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=post%20viewer

Are you holding Figma, or waiting for a better entry?

Disclosure: I don't own FIG. Personal thesis, not investment advice. Do your own research.

Been digging into MercadoLibre after the selloff and the setup is hard to ignore. The stock's down ~40% to near a 52 week low, and everyone's fixated on the margin cause operating margin fell from 13.5% to 6.9% in about a year. I think that's being misread.

Two thirds of that drop is just the cost of reserving against a credit book that nearly doubled (+87% to $14.6B). MELI books the expected loss the moment it writes a loan; the interest income arrives over the following months, so a fast growing book looks unprofitable today even as each cohort seasons into profit. It's the same accounting Klarna spelled out for its own loan book on Q1 2026, provision the loss upfront, book the revenue over the life of the loan, so a rising provision line on a fast-growing book doesn't mean rising defaults.

The rest is a deliberate Brazil free-shipping cut and a first-party inventory push to fight off Shopee and Temu. Through all of it, revenue still grew 49% and operating income still grew in absolute dollars. That's reinvestment, not deterioration and MELI ran the same play in 2016 to build the logistics lead it has today.

Meanwhile, with margins sitting at a deliberate trough, the stock trades at:

• ~3x EV/sales, vs a ~10x historical average
• a forward P/E in the low-30s, vs a 62x peak last October
• a PEG below 1, on revenue growing ~49%

The market's pricing a near 50% grower like a slow retailer whose best days are behind it.

I won't pretend it's as good as catching a company right at its first profit print (Chime recently after Q1 2026 earnings) that's the real asymmetry. This is the second best setup: a dip in a proven compounder that dominates LatAm e-commerce and fintech.

Curious if anyone else has been looking at it. Am I missing something obvious on the credit risk? Would you buy it at $1600?

Disclosure: This is my personal thesis, not investment advice. I am not a registered investment adviser. Do your own research and size positions according to your own risk tolerance

Bought my first HOOD shares at $38 in late 2024 after listening to Vlad Tenev on 20VC. The thesis that hooked me was multi-product revenue: nine revenue lines generating >$100M each, stacked into one wallet.

1. The deceleration is not a business problem

Q3 2025 was a once in a decade: revenue +100% YoY, every trading line at record volumes. Everything that follows compares against that. The Q1 2026 numbers are actually accelerating:

• Net deposits $17.7B
• Gold subscribers 4.3M
• Banking grew 5x sequentially
• Prediction markets +320% YoY

2. The fintech peers are catching up

I'm also holding SOFI, NU, CHIME, KLAR. Three of them are running variations of the same multi-stream wallet playbook:

• NU at ~15x forward PE, +57% growth
• SOFI at ~28x, +41% growth
• HOOD at ~36x, +15% growth

On any value screen, HOOD is the hardest premium to defend. NU is unambiguously the better PEG setup.

But HOOD has three things the others don't: a Gen Z brokerage demographic no one else can replicate, sole-broker access to Trump Accounts (5.5M of 60M+ eligible US children, 18-year lockup), and a build velocity that just took the wallet from nine revenue streams to twelve.

So the framework worked. The cross-sell flywheel engaged. And I'm still not adding at $74.

Would you buy HOOD at $74 or wait for a deeper pullback?

Disclosure: This is my personal thesis, not investment advice. I am not a registered investment adviser. Do your own research and size positions according to your own risk tolerance

Chime just printed its first GAAP profitable quarter as a public company, and the market sold it off around 12%. I think the same setup that produced reratings in SoFi and Nubank is the one setting up here

What Q1 2026 numbers show

The headline is GAAP profitability inflection $53M of net income on revenue of $647M. But the most important read, Chime is diversifying away from pure interchange revenue dependence. Platform revenue (MyPay, Instant Loans, etc…) grew 50% YoY and is now a third of the revenue base

And the Chime Prime launch in Q2 extends the TAM upmarket into households earning $100-200K which I think is the lever to sustain 20%+ revenue growth past 2027. Management is showing confidence in the business by authorizing another $200M buyback. This doesn’t look like a company near terminal growth, but a company sustaining +20% growth for the upcoming years

Why I think this is the SoFi/Nubank moment

I owned both through their inflection points. With SoFi, I was down from $9 to $7 through the early part of 2024 even after their first GAAP profit in Q4 2023 but the stock ended up 2024 rerating near $15

With Nubank, I held because the product was clearly winning account share in Brazil and ARPAC was compounding and the multiple eventually caught up once profitability started

In both cases, the lesson was the same: the first profitable print is almost never the trade. but 6-12 months after that. What kept me in both names through the money lossing periods was conviction in the product, the TAM, and the unit economics, which the market just wasn't ready to price them. That's exactly where I think Chime is right now

The product adoption and the ARPAM compounding

Two-thirds of active members use Chime as their primary account, payroll, bills, and other transactions a month of which 75% are in non discretionary categories like groceries and gas. Once payroll is in, customer retention is north of 90%

The cross sell flywheel is showing up in the numbers, but what is interesting is which products are doing the work. MyPay went from launch to over $400M annualized revenue in 12 months, and its transaction margin grew from 45% in Q3 2025 to 62% in Q1 2026. Chime Card is the other one to watch, the share of purchase volume on credit went from 16% in September to nearly 25% by March, and members who have the card put 70%+ of their Chime spend on it. That mix shift toward higher take rate products is what is pulling gross margin to 90% and platform revenue up 50% YoY versus payments at 15%

15% of active members now use 6+ products and generate $500+ ARPAM, two years ago that figure was 5% of members, so the cohort is both growing as a share of the base and monetizing better as it grows. Compared to Nubank ARPAC went from ~$8 in 2022 to $13.40 in late 2025, same shape of the curve. Chime is at $263 blended ARPAM with a path towards $350-400 over 3-5 years as the existing products Credit Builder, MyPay, Instant Loans, and now Chime Prime adoption continues. And with member penetration still in single digits (8% of 120M Americans earning <$100K, plus the new <$200k households), there's a runway to keep compounding both members and revenue per member

Valuation and the peer comparison

Chime, currently trading at around ~$18 and ~$6.9B market cap, trades at roughly 2.5x 2026 revenue guidance. SoFi trades around 5x. Nubank trades 8-10x. Robinhood is 7-9x

The relevant precedent: SoFi was at 3-4x sales heading into its Q4 2023 first GAAP profit print, and rerated to ~5-6x through 2024; Nubank traded around 5x pre-profitability and now sits at ~9x

I think CHYM is not yet being priced like a payments-led platform with 90% gross margins and a real path to high-20s operating margin at scale. If revenue compounds 20-22% through 2030 and the multiple rerates to even 4-5x sales (still below peers), the math is a multi-bagger from here. So, Conservative case 20% revenue CAGR through 2030 gets Chime to ~$5.5B in revenue. At 4x sales, still below where SoFi trades today, that’s a ~$22B market cap, roughly a 3x from here. In a Bull case 22% CAGR and a Nubank style rerating to 7-8x sales puts you closer to ~$40-45B, a 5-6x return

The math I'd want pushed back on, if the right base case is closer to 15% than the 20%+ I'm assuming, the multi-bagger math doesn't hold and you're left with a 2x at best. Curious where bears would lean, on the growth deceleration or somewhere else in the thesis?  

Disclosure: Long CHYM, average cost around $20.85. Also long SOFI and NU. This is my personal thesis, not investment advice. I am not a registered investment adviser. Do your own research and size positions according to your own risk tolerance

I've been watching the BNPL space for over a year. Early last year I had the conviction Sezzle was the obvious value play: profitable, growing fast, subscription-based revenue. Sezzle went from ~$40 to ~$180 and I regret not pulling the trigger.

When Klarna IPO'd in September 2025 at $45, I passed. Too expensive. Then the stock halved. I started buying in December 2025 at $29 and I’ve been buying every two months. Bought again in February 2026 at ~$19 and recently bought again when the stock was trading around $13. Current average cost is around $18. Stock now trades at ~$14, and is down ~75% from its IPO high.

This post is my attempt to stress test my own thesis. I'm picking Klarna over the much more profitable Sezzle and I want to lay out why.

1. The numbers that favor Sezzle

Both just reported their FY2025 results in February 2026.

Sezzle (FY2025):

-Revenue: $450.3M, growing 66.1% YoY

-Q4 revenue: $129.9M, up 32.2% YoY

-GAAP net income: $133.1M (29.6% margin)

-GMV: $3.94B for the year, up 55.1% YoY

-P/E: ~22x

-Market cap: ~$2.5B

2026 guidance: 25-30% revenue growth, $170M adjusted net income (31% YoY growth), $4.70 adjusted EPS

Klarna (FY2025):

-Revenue: $3.5B, growing 25% YoY

-Q4 revenue: $1.08B (first billion-dollar quarter), up 38% YoY

-Net loss: ($294M), or ($0.79) per share for the year

-Adjusted operating profit: $65M (1.9% adjusted operating margin, barely positive)

-GMV: $127.9B, up 22% (Q4 GMV up 32%)

-118M active consumers (+28% YoY)

-966K merchants (+42% YoY)

-Market cap: ~$5.5B

2026 guidance: GMV of $155B, adjusted operating margin of 6.9%.

From a conventional value screen, Sezzle is a profitable compounder trading at 22x earnings with margins still expanding. Klarna is a money losing fintech.

The take rate gap is just as ugly. Sezzle monetizes 11.4% of every dollar of GMV. Klarna monetizes 2.7%. Sezzle pulls roughly 4x more revenue per dollar of volume flowing through its platform.

If you're running a value screen for "Revenue>30% + GAAP profitability + reasonable multiple" Sezzle is the answer and Klarna is discarded.

2. Why I'm buying Klarna the money loser anyway

Three things changed my mind. I'll go through them in order.

First: these companies are not competing in the same market.

Sezzle is a North American BNPL optimized for subscription conversion. They are already ~3M users.• and ~$1B quarterly GMV. Great business in a defined market.

Klarna is a global payments network in transformation to a neobank. 118M active users across 45 countries. ~$33B quarterly GMV. 1M+ merchants. It's 33x Sezzle's GMV and 8x its revenue. Comparing them on volume is like comparing Square's Cash App to a regional credit union because both process payments.

The right frame isn't "which BNPL is better run." It's "which BNPL becomes a payments network, and which stays a lending product." Those I think have wildly different terminal values.

Second: distribution economics in payments are winner-take-most, and Klarna owns distribution.

The Walmart partnership alone is the thesis. Klarna is the exclusive BNPL provider for Walmart starting H2 2025. Walmart does $420B in annual US sales. Even 1% BNPL attachment is $4B incremental GMV, that’s 12% of Klarna's entire current GMV just from one retailer.

Add the PSP integrations: Klarna is embedded inside Stripe, Worldpay, Adyen, JPMorgan Chase. Those four process trillions in annual volume. Klarna doesn't sign merchants one by one anymore. It gets distributed by the PSP themselves.

Half of the top 100 US online retailers already offer Klarna. In European markets where Klarna has been operating longer, it's 20-40% of checkout share. In the US it's still ~26% and growing. Sezzle's merchant base is ~600K, mostly SMBs. No exclusive partnership with a single top 10 US retailer. They consciously exited Europe, India, and Brazil to optimize for US profitability. That's a valid strategy. It's just not the strategy that builds a payments network.

Third: Klarna’s revenue composition is shifting in a way that changes the business.

This is the part I think the market is missing. Klarna's ARPU progression by product engagement:

Baseline BNPL user: $30 revenue per customer

Active app user (shopping, cashback, ~10% of customers): $90 per customer (from Q3 2025 Earnings Call)

Klarna Card holder (~3% of base, but growing fast): $130 per customer  (from Q3 2025 Earnings Call)

The card user is 4.3x more monetizable than the baseline BNPL user. And card adoption just crossed 4.2M users globally, almost half of those 1.4M in the US (Q3 2025), built from zero.

On top of this, Klarna advertising revenue scaled from $13M in 2020 to $180M in 2024 (from S-1), roughly a 93% CAGR over four years. That's high-margin take rate on the consumer base they already have and no additional acquisition cost. Amazon already figured out that the shopping app becomes the ad network, once you have hundreds of millions of users in a shopping app with user purchase intent data, the ad business that sits on top of it grows faster than the underlying commerce, Amazon Ads went from a side business to $68.6 billion in 2025.  Klarna is running the same playbook with 118M users already in the app.

If Klarna successfully shifts even 10% of its base to card usage and grows ad revenue at 30%, the revenue composition looks structurally different in 3 years. You're not buying a lender anymore. You're buying a global payments brand with an attached ad network.

3. I worry about Sezzle’s subscription penetration ceiling

Sezzle's entire growth engine right now is subscription conversion, higher marketing and advertising spend from $2.4M in Q3 2024 to $8.8M (+266% YoY) in Q3 2025. This works until it doesn't. Subscription penetration has a ceiling. Once you've converted the converters, growth decelerates. Sezzle's CEO acknowledged this on the Q2 2024 call “there might be a limiting function" on the subscriber-to-active-user ratio, and they don't know where it is.

Sezzle's other growth lever is taking more credit risk. They raised their target loss rate to 2.5-3% in 2025 (Q1 2025 Earnings Call) to prioritize growth. That's a healthy response for now, but it's also the leading indicator of a lender stretching for volume. 

4. The valuation

Here's the part where value investors will want to argue with me.

Sezzle at ~$2.6B market cap, ~22x P/E, ~30% net margin. That’s cheap for the growth. But the realistic terminal state is a profitable US BNPL doing $1-1.5B revenue in 5 years with maybe 25-30% operating margins. At a generous 20x P/E that's a $5-9B market cap. You'd roughly double or triple your money if execution is clean.

Klarna at ~$5.5B market cap, negative P/E today. But the company did ~$3.5B in revenue last twelve months growing 24% with a 30%+ transaction margin. It has an actual banking license, 118M active users. If Klarna hits $7B revenue in 4 years at 10% net margins you get $700M in earnings. Even at a compressed 20x multiple that's $14B, or 2.5x today. At 30x (reasonable for a payments network, not a lender) it's $21B. 4x the current market cap.

The asymmetry runs the other way. Sezzle is priced for the business it is. If Klarna executes on banking conversion and fixes its transaction margin and scales advertising,  it is priced at a fraction of several plausible terminal states.

Where I stand

Long Klarna, average cost ~$18. Not long Sezzle. I respect the business, I just don't think I can make 10x from here in 10 years.

The pattern I keep coming back to: I missed Nu at the early stage because it was unprofitable and I was optimizing for current margins. I'm not making the same mistake with Klarna.

Curious to hear others on the bear case on Klarna and Sezzle’s bull case.

Disclosure: Long KLAR, average cost ~$18. No position in SEZL. This is my personal thesis, not investment advice. This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice or a recommendation to buy.