😈 Intuit Closes Out a Monster Year. nCino Profits But Investors Panic. Coinbase Puts Stocks On-Chain.

0:00Imagine making$21 billion, right? Right. Just acing every single test, turning this massive profit and still getting completely grounded by your shareholders. Exactly. Having your investors just panic and sell your stock. I mean, welcome to Wall Street in late August 2026. It is it's report card season for the markets. And we are seeing these companies deliver just flawless performances only to get punished. Right. The grading system is completely inverted right now. And, you know, frankly, to any rational person, it's absolutely baffling. It really is. It defies basic common sense until you look under the hood anyway.

0:40You could do everything right fundamentally, grow your revenue, secure your margins, hit your targets and still get sent straight to the principal's office by the market. Yeah. It really forces you to question what investors are actually buying when they buy a stock today. Which is exactly why today we are taking a deep dive into a recent financial newsletter stack from FinTech Stacks. We've got three different tech and finance companies reporting their earnings or, well, in one case, making a massive announcement. Right. And they are giving off three totally different vibes. We're looking at Intuit, we're looking at Encino, and we're looking at Coinbase.

1:15The contrasts here are just wild. Putting them side by side, it really exposes the bizarre underlying psychology of the market right now. Yeah. So our mission today is to decode this logic. Like, why does a flawless performance result in a punishment? And perhaps even more fascinating, what happens when a massive company decides to just, you know, refuse to play the game entirely and builds its own school? Yeah. So, OK, let's unpack this, starting with the straight A student of our group, Intuit. The quintessential overachiever of the financial tech world. Oh, to say they overachieved is an understatement.

1:47If we look at their transcript for fiscal 2026, it is completely stacked. I mean, full year revenue crossed$21.4 billion. That is up 14%. Q4 alone came in at$4.4 billion, also up 14 % year over year. And before we just gloss over their profitability, their GAAP-diluted earnings per share hit$16.46. Right. That's a 20 % jump. And their non-GAAP EPS landed at$24.27. cents. Let's actually pause there and translate those accounting acronyms for a second because they do matter. So GAAP stands for Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. It's the strict, you know, standardized set of rules that every company has to follow so the government and investors can compare apples to apples.

2:34Right. And earnings per share, or EPS, is exactly what it sounds like. If you took all the company's profit and divided it by the number of shares out there. That's your number. Okay. So the strict by the book profit was that$16.46 per share. But what is the non-GAAP number? Like why is that one so much higher at 2427? Yeah. So non-GAAP is essentially the company's internal view of their own success. It's them saying, hey, if you ignore some one-time costs or stock-based compensation that we pay to our engineers, this is our real operating profit. Oh, I see. Yeah. Investors look at both. But the fact that both numbers jumped by 20 % on a company making over$20 billion is a massive compounding achievement.

3:20Yeah. Maintaining double-digit growth at that scale is incredibly difficult. It really is. And what's interesting to me is where that growth is actually coming from. It's intimately tied to everyday consumer behavior. Let's look at Credit Karma. The newsletter hilariously describes this as the app that tells Millennials their credit score is fine actually which is so accurate right and Q4 credit karma revenue jumped 16 % to 743 million dollars they are making all this money off personal loans auto insurance and credit card referrals and that data point alone tells you so much about the macroeconomic environment right now because despite inflation or interest rate concerns people are still seeking out credit they are still shopping around for auto insurance.

4:05Yeah. And they're actively using these marketplace tools to do it. Credit Karma basically acts as a toll booth for consumer finance. That's a great way to put it. And then there's TurboTax. They leaned really hard into a feature called TurboTax Live, which grew a staggering 37 percent. Wow. It now makes up more than half of all TurboTax revenue. It's huge. Yeah. Intuit was founded back in 1983. And fast forward to today, they own QuickBooks, MailChimp, Credit Karma, TurboTax, I mean, they are the operating system for a generation's money. They really are. Whether you're filing a 1099 for your Uber driving side hustle or checking your credit score, they are there.

4:44But here is the observation from the piece that really stuck with me. Even Gen Z and millennials who grew up with iPads in their hands, they still want a human. Right. Or, you know, an AI pretending to be a human checking their tax math. Because the stakes are too high. A digital interface is great for checking a bank balance. But when you are dealing with the IRS, the latent anxiety of an audit completely overrides digital fluency. People will gladly pay a significant premium for a live verification feature just for the peace of mind. And mechanically, it is a brilliant way for Intuit to increase their revenue per user without having to build an entirely new product.

5:28It's flawless execution. I mean, they crush the year. But here is the catch. Despite this monster performance, they issued their fiscal 27 guidance, you know, their forecast for next year. Right. And they told Wall Street they expect revenue growth to step down to just 9 to 10 percent. Ouch. Yeah. The newsletter uses a great analogy for this. It's like acing every single class your freshman year, only to be handed a syllabus that says next semester is going to be significantly harder. And if there's one thing Wall Street cannot tolerate, it is a harder syllabus. Okay, wait, hold on. make this make sense to me.

5:59If I'm an investor and I see a company that just made$21.4 billion, they are generating massive real world cash profits. And they are telling me, hey, we are going to grow a little bit less fast next year, but we will still grow by billions of dollars. Why is that treated as a massive dark cloud? The stock took a hit. It did. Why does a slight dip in future growth erase the absolute triumph of the present? Well, what's fascinating here is the fundamental mechanism of how stocks are valued in the modern era. Because a stock price isn't a trophy for past performance. Right. It is a mathematical prediction.

6:38Specifically, analysts use something called a discounted cash flow model. Okay. They're basically trying to guess how much cash the company will generate for the next 10 or 20 years, and then calculating what that future pile of money is worth today. So the$21.4 billion they just made doesn't matter to the stock price. It only matters as a baseline for the formula. Yeah. If a stock is trading at a high premium, meaning the price of a share is very expensive compared to the actual profit the company is making right now, it's because of an implicit contract. OK. What's the contract? The contract says we will keep compounding our growth at 14, 15, 20 percent.

7:14It's exponential math. If that growth rate drops even slightly, the entire 20-year calculation collapses. So when Intuit says, actually, we might only grow 9 % or 10 % next year. They are breaking the implicit contract. The market instantly recalibrates. Wall Street looks at that 9 % and starts asking terrifying questions. Like what? Like, are we reaching market saturation? Is the core tax business slowing down? Should we value Intuit like a slow, boring utility company rather than a high-flying tech stock? A great year is simply not the same thing as a great outlook. Man, it's a brutal treadmill.

7:51It's like you run a sub four minute mile and the market says, great, now do it in three minutes and 50 seconds or you're dead to us. Which is exactly why being a public tech CEO is such a high burnout job. Is there any winning them? Because if you think Intuit's situation is frustrating, let's look at our second company, Encino, ticker symbol NCNO. Because if Intuit is suffering from the burden of impossibly high expectations, Encino shows what happens when you actually cross the finish line that investors have been demanding for years and the crowd just boos you anyway. Ah, yes. The elusive pivot to profitability.

8:27This has been the overarching narrative in tech for the last two years. Yes. So Encino is a banking software platform. And for Q2 fiscal 2027, their revenue hit$161 million, which is up 8 % year over year. And that actually beat Wall Street's expectation of$159.1 million. But the headline here is that for the first time in a long time, they made actual real money. Their GAAP operating income swung to a positive$13.6 million. Just a year ago, they were posting a$9.3 million loss. Flipping a software business from burning cash to generating cash is a massive operational turnaround. Yeah, and their non-GAAP operating margin climbed to 25%, which the newsletter points out is up 500 basis points.

9:14They actually have so much cash now that they tacked on a new$100 million stock buyback on top of$300 million they have already repurchased. Wait, before we move on, let's clarify that 500 basis points metric. Oh, yeah. Because finance people love using that term to sound smarter than they are. Totally. One basis point is simply one hundredth of a percent. So 500 basis points just means their margin went up by exactly five percentage points. Right. They use basis points to avoid confusion when talking about percentages of percentages. But fundamentally, it just means they are keeping a significantly larger chunk of every dollar they bring in.

9:52So how do they actually pull that off? Because you don't just magically wave a wand and go from losing$9 million to making$13 million. No, you don't. In the software world, your biggest expense by far is customer acquisition. It's the marketing, the sales teams, the wine and dine required to get a bank to sign a contract. But once the software is installed, it costs very little to maintain. Right. The margins are huge. Exactly. So to pivot to profitability, a company like Encino likely slowed down their aggressive, expensive hunt for new logos, reduced their headcount or marketing spend, and focused on squeezing efficiency out of the customers they already had.

10:30And speaking of those customers, they had major wins. They secured early renewals from four major U.S. enterprise banks, representing over$900 billion in combined assets. Wow. Plus, they signed Japan's Hachijuni Nagano Bank to consolidate its lending operations. I mean, these are massive traditional financial institutions locking themselves into Encino's ecosystem. Which is critical because bank software is incredibly sticky. What do you mean? Once a bank integrates a platform to run its core lending operations, ripping it out and replacing it is like performing a root canal on a moving train.

11:04Right. It takes years and costs millions. So those early renewals are essentially guaranteed cash flow for years to come. Okay, so tally this up with me. You have a$13.6 million profit, massive margin expansion, hundreds of millions in stock buybacks, and guaranteed revenue from banks holding nearly a trillion dollars in assets. It's amazing. You would think the stock would soar. Yeah. But no. The stock dropped roughly 10 % in after hours trading following this report. It is the cruelest irony of the current market. Why does this happen? The newsletter points to one metric and it's deceleration.

11:40Right. That 8 % growth this quarter, it's down from the 11 % they were putting up just two quarters ago. And their forward guidance implies this slowdown is going to continue. Yeah. So what does this all mean? The source uses a brilliant sports analogy here. It's the fintech equivalent of a running back posting solid individual stats and a blowout loss. The box score looks fine, but nobody on the sideline is smiling. Yeah, if we connect this to the bigger picture, Wall Street is speaking out of both sides of its mouth here. For years, the mandate to tech CEOs was stop prioritizing growth at all costs.

12:13Show us a path to profitability. And so Encino did exactly that. They did. They tightened their belts. They expanded their margins. They turned a profit. They played by the rules. They did. But what Wall Street doesn't say out loud is show us profitability, but whatever you do, do not sacrifice a single percentage point of top line revenue growth to get there. It is an almost mathematically impossible balancing act. The problem Encino faces is that dropping to 8 % growth in the software world triggers an identity crisis for the stock. Meaning investors don't know what kind of company they are buying anymore.

12:51Exactly. At 8%, you are no longer a growth tech company. You are a legacy software company. Profitability does not buy you patience. It actually removes the excuse of hyper growth. Wow. Wall Street looks at Encino and says, OK, you're profitable. That's nice. But if you are only growing at 8%, why should we pay a premium tech price for your shares? Right. They want their cake. They want to eat it. And they want the cake to magically double in size while they chew. It's exhausting. Intuit gets punished for future growth slipping slightly despite making billions. Encino gets punished for slowing growth despite finally achieving the holy grail of profit.

13:29Yeah. If the game is rigged, why keep playing it? Which brings us perfectly to Coinbase. Yes. What if you just flip the board over and build a new game? And this is where the landscape shifts from, you know, financial metrics to fundamental market plumbing. Yeah, because while Intuit and Encino were sweating out their quarterly earnings reports and managing Wall Street's impossible expectations, Coinbase skipped the test. They really did. On a random Monday in August, they effectively put Wall Street on the blockchain. It is a genuinely disruptive move. We need to break down the mechanics of exactly what they did here because the how is just as important as the what.

14:06Here is what happened. Coinbase took tokenized versions of major U.S. stocks, so NVIDIA, Apple, Meta, and made them live on base. Right. And base is Coinbase's own layer two blockchain network. Let's clarify what a layer two network actually is for a second. Think of the main Ethereum blockchain, layer one, like a busy, congested downtown street. It's highly secure, but it's slow, and the toll to use it is very expensive. Right. A Layer 2 network, like Base, is an express lane built directly above that street. It processes transactions incredibly fast and for fractions of a penny, but it still relies on the main street for its ultimate security.

14:46Okay, so these digital tokens representing NVIDIA are trading on this super fast express lane. But how does a digital token floating around on a blockchain actually know what a real share of NVIDIA is trading for on the NASDAQ? Yeah. To solve that, they are using Chainlink to supply real-time price feeds. And that is a massive technical hurdle called the Oracle problem. The Oracle problem. Yeah. A blockchain is completely blind. It has no idea what is happening in the outside world. It doesn't know who the president is. It doesn't know the weather. And it definitely doesn't know the price of Apple stock.

15:18Right. So Chainlink acts as the data bridge or the Oracle. It constantly pulls price data from traditional financial exchanges and feeds it securely into the blockchain so the tokens can mirror the real world assets perfectly without any arbitrage discrepancies. That's incredible. And to put this in context, Coinbase was founded back in 2012. They're the largest U.S. crypto exchange. But lately, their entire strategy has been chasing regulatory legitimacy. They recently secured a conditional national trust charter from the Office of the Controller of the Currency, the OCC. That is a big deal. The OCC regulates traditional legacy banks.

15:57By getting that charter, Coinbase is basically putting on the suit and tie. They are proving they can safeguard assets with the same rigor as a Wall Street institution. Right. And here's where it gets really interesting. They are using that new suit and tie legitimacy to completely dismantle how we trade equities. Yeah. Normally, you go through a brokerage, you put in an order for NVIDIA, and you wait for the market to open at 9.30 a.m. Eastern. With Coinbase's tokens, it's crypto. It is tradable 24-7. You can trade a tokenized share of NVIDIA on a Sunday at 3 a.m. from your phone. Not only that, but the way the trade settles is entirely different.

16:34How so? Well, in traditional finance, we have something called T plus one settlement. When you buy a stock, a massive centralized clearinghouse has to verify the money, verify the shares and make the swap. OK. It takes a full business day. It's like using a slow bureaucratic escrow agent. On the blockchain, it settles instantly on chain. The moment you click buy, the token is in your wallet and the cash is gone. Wow. It is the digital equivalent of handing someone a$20 bill across the table. That is wild. The newsletter actually compares this to the Robinhood era, where Robinhood democratized stock trading by eliminating fees.

17:09But Coinbase is democratizing the time and the infrastructure. Exactly. But I have a serious question about this. If these quote unquote shares never sleep and they live on a blockchain, what is the line between a crypto asset and a traditional stock anymore? Does it even exist? Historically, the line was incredibly clear. A stock represented fractional ownership in a legally recognized corporation. It was heavily regulated by the SEC, and it traded on a centralized exchange with designated operating hours. Right. A crypto asset was a decentralized digital bearer instrument that traded in the Wild West.

17:46What Coinbase is doing here is intentionally collapsing those definitions. They are just mashing them together into one thing. Symbolically, this is massive. Coinbase wants to own the blur. By making owning a piece of NVIDIA feel exactly like owning a fraction of a Bitcoin, they are trying to normalize blockchain as the default financial rail for the next generation. Yeah. They are saying to the traditional market, your clearinghouses, your settlement delays, your closing bells, they're archaic. We have built a better machine. It completely recontextualizes the struggles of Intuit and Encino. It really does.

18:19Those two companies are fighting to the death for a good grade in a 20th century school system. Right. Meanwhile, Coinbase is out here building an entirely new internet for finance. They aren't trying to beat Wall Street at the earnings game. They are trying to replace the stadium where the game is played. Precisely. And in doing so, it forces regulators, institutional investors, and everyday consumers to rethink their most basic assumptions about what it actually means to own an asset. So let's pull all these threads together. This has been a wild look at the late summer 2026 market. Yeah. We saw Intuit, the straight A student, prove that a historically great year is not the same thing as a great outlook and that Wall Street only cares about tomorrow's cash flows.

19:05We saw Encino prove that achieving the long demanded goal of profitability does not buy you any patience if your growth engine is decelerating. Right. And we saw Coinbase skip the whole circus and prove that the very concept of a stock is evolving, putting Nvidia on the blockchain and making it a 24-7 asset. Yeah. But I want to bring this back to reality. If someone is tuning into this deep dive, why should they care about the plight of these three specific companies? Because it impacts the mechanics of your daily financial life. Right. Whether you are actively tracking your own retirement portfolio or, you know, you're a developer wearing a fintech hoodie or you're just a normal person checking your debit card balances on an app.

19:42This matters. Yeah. Even if you're just the person having to text your friend to remind them to finally file their K-1 tax forms, which our newsletter author hilariously calls out, you are interacting with this shifting ecosystem. Sure. The fundamental architecture of money, how it is managed, how it is valued, and how it is traded is changing beneath our feet. It really is. The companies we rely on to manage our financial lives are being held to totally irrational, impossible standards, while the actual infrastructure of the market itself is being rewritten in real time by crypto. And this raises an important question, one that I think completely reframes everything we have explored today.

20:23Okay, what is it? Well, we started by analyzing the intense pressure of the quarterly earnings report card. The traditional nine to five market reacting violently to a single data point dropped on a Tuesday afternoon. Right. The system that tanked Intuit and Encino. But if Coinbase's tokenized stocks succeed and equities truly become 24-7 assets that never sleep, constantly reacting to global news in real time on a decentralized blockchain. Oh, wow. How long until the traditional, human-driven 9-to-5 Wall Street market hours become completely obsolete? Wow. If a stock doesn't stop trading at 4 p.m., there is no after-hours market.

21:01Exactly. If stocks trade constantly, every second of every day on a global network, will the very concept of a formalized, highly anticipated quarterly earnings report card eventually cease to exist entirely? That is. Will companies just stream their financial data continuously on-chain? that is a wild thought a world without the report card just a continuous never-ending stream of financial reality yeah no closing bells no rigged grading curves just well something for all of us to mull over as we watch this market evolve definitely until next time