Trading Post Wednesday April 15, 2026

Software & Payments, Chocolate & Peanut Butter

Despite the recent bounce, software stocks remain interesting because of accelerated extreme declines last week arising from a reflexive positive feedback loop between falling software stocks and changes in the market for their bank debt.

I do not believe the technical pressures brought on by the private credit/software debt issues are big enough to affect these stocks for much longer.

Further, given significant declines in the payments space of late, I expanded my study of software stocks to include payment stocks, which are at the very least software-adjacent.

As a result, I have preliminarily found this company to rank just ahead of Fiserv (FISV) and Adobe (ADBE) near the top of my software/payments universe. This ranking considers stock-based compensation practices, competitive position with respect to current and future LLM/Agent implementation, and discounted full-spectrum owners’ earnings valuation.