My goodness, what a start.

Even though it’s the product of tens of thousands of hours of research, more than 8,000 investing articles, and over a decade of experience managing real-money portfolios for some of the largest investing services in the world, I was still admittedly giddy when we officially launched the BLI Premium Portfolio earlier this month.

As of today, the BLI Premium portfolio as a whole is already up 11%, led by a 25% gain from the portfolio’s single-largest position: SoFi Technologies (NASDAQ: SOFI).

Of course, we all know gains can be fleeting in this market. And make no mistake: I’m building this portfolio with the goal of crushing the market over the long term. But I’ll happily embrace this early lead.

To that end, you might recall I started with 12 stocks at launch, and — as a thanks for your early engagement with our free newsletter — even previously sent you the names of five of those stocks in advance (including SoFi).

But why did I pile so heavily into SoFi right from the start?

I’ve closely followed the fintech leader on its relentless forward march since its pre-SPAC days in 2021. And as I alluded in my SoFi earnings preview this weekend, I believe the company is fully capable of achieving CEO Anthony Noto’s longstanding goal of becoming a top-10 financial institution in the United States.

Put simply, I’ve grown increasingly confident in SoFi’s trajectory in recent quarters, and it earned the highest conviction of any stock in my portfolio. So I allocated the earliest positions in the BLI Premium Portfolio accordingly.

As expected, SoFi delivered its first-ever quarterly GAAP profit on a consolidated basis earlier today. It also handily beat expectations on revenue, added nearly 585,000 new members during the quarter, and saw deposits at SoFi Bank increase by $2.9 billion sequentially to end the year at $18.6 billion — a swelling war chest that serves as a lower-cost funding source for SoFi’s fast-growing loans business.

During the subsequent conference call, SoFi management also effectively addressed the risk I outlined in my earnings preview about mark-to-market adjustments on the fair value of its held-for-sale loan portfolio.

If you’re a BLI Premium Member, you can read my full take on SoFi’s earnings report (sent in a separate email) in yesterday’s premium update here.

• iRobot and Amazon officially called off their merger, as expected, citing no path to regulatory approval in the European Union. iRobot will receive a $94 million termination fee, but also announced a 31% reduction in force, drastic reductions in R&D/Sales & Marketing, and the resignation of founder Colin Angle as company Chairman and CEO.
  
  I’d previously hoped that iRobot would be able to more rapidly re-ramp its R&D and S&M expenditures, and the loss of Colin Angle is incredibly disappointing. Premium members can read my full take on the Amazon/iRobot news here.
  

• I had a wonderful talk this weekend with Hoda Mehr, CEO of Stock Card — the platform that helped us develop our interactive portfolio tool for BLI. We discussed best stocks to buy now as well as the strategy behind my BLAST investing framework.
  

• Bottom Line Investing now has a YouTube channel, @BottomLineInvesting! Subscribe to our YouTube channel to watch us build our library of free investing video content from scratch.