I was already bullish on Circle Internet Group before I ever ran the numbers. My conviction came from something more direct than a chart — first-hand experience with the problem stablecoins solve. Moving money through traditional financial infrastructure is genuinely painful. You send money internationally and you are paying someone at every step — your bank, their bank, a correspondent bank, a currency conversion desk — just to move a number from one ledger to another. It takes days. The rules are opaque. The fees are everywhere. USDC removes most of those frictions. A transaction settles in seconds, globally, at near-zero cost, with a stable dollar value. You do not have to take price risk the way you do with Bitcoin or Ethereum. You are still using dollars, just on fundamentally better rails.
That is not a niche crypto use case. That is a better version of money movement for anyone who has ever dealt with cross-border payments, freelance income, remittances, or international business. The total addressable market is not crypto users. It is everyone who moves money. According to Circle's investor relations materials, the global stablecoin market was estimated at approximately $282 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach between $1.6 trillion and $3.7 trillion by 2030 depending on regulatory and adoption outcomes.
So I was already leaning toward buying. But being bullish on a thesis and buying intelligently are two different things. On February 5th, 2026, I noticed CRCL was down significantly on what felt like a reasonably strong market day. That kind of disconnect sharpens focus. I wanted to make sure I was not buying blindly into my own bias, so I used Gemini to stress test the thesis, run through the key metrics, and understand exactly what was driving the price down. What came back confirmed that the business was strong, the headwinds were real but mostly sentiment-driven, and the long-term case was intact. That was enough. I bought.
At the time the stock was trading around $55, well off its 52-week high of $298.99 per Yahoo Finance data. The price weakness had four distinct drivers. Circle's primary revenue comes from net interest income on the Treasury reserves backing USDC, and with the Fed cutting rates, that yield had plummeted — lower rates directly translate to lower profit margins for a stablecoin issuer, and investors were repricing accordingly. CRCL also trades like a crypto-adjacent stock, and with Bitcoin dipping below $73,000 at the time, levels not seen since late 2024 according to CoinMarketCap, crypto sentiment dragged down Circle, Coinbase, and MicroStrategy with it. Lock-up expirations had allowed early investors and employees to sell into the market following Circle's 2025 IPO at around $31. And management had signaled rising operating expenses as they built out the Circle Payments Network and expanded into South Korea and the UAE, which the market was punishing during a period of shrinking interest income. The summary was blunt: Circle is a much bigger and more profitable company than it was a year ago, but its stock was being treated like a risk-on crypto asset.
When you separated the stock from the business, the picture looked very different. Per Investing.com, Q3 2025 earnings had already flagged the growth trajectory clearly — revenue came in at $740 million, up 66% year over year, net income at $214 million, up 202% year over year, beating analyst EPS expectations by 276%. The only reason the stock fell after those numbers was that management raised their spending outlook for Arc and global expansion. The market punished investment in the future rather than rewarding the results of the past.
Three forward-looking developments made the long-term case particularly compelling. Circle is building Arc, its own Layer-1 blockchain transitioning from testnet to full production in 2026, their attempt to own the pipes money moves through and not just the money itself. Per Circle's official press release on Business Wire, more than 100 companies joined the Arc public testnet launch, including major names across banking, payments, digital assets, and capital markets. In December 2025, the company received conditional approval for a national trust bank charter, which would allow it to hold its own reserves rather than paying other banks to do so — a structural margin improvement that most investors were not pricing in. And the Circle Payments Network, since launching in mid-2025, had already enrolled 55 financial institutions with 74 more in the eligibility pipeline, generating $5.7 billion in annualized transaction volume as of late February 2026, according to Circle's Q4 earnings press release.
Now here is where the valuation picture gets interesting, and worth sitting with carefully. On a trailing basis per GuruFocus data, CRCL shows a net loss — diluted EPS of negative $0.44, levered free cash flow of negative $91 million, and a trailing profit margin of negative 2.53%. Return on equity sits at negative 2.76% and return on assets at negative 0.10%. The trailing P/E is not calculable at a loss, the price-to-book ratio is 8.55, price-to-sales is 6.67, and enterprise value to revenue is 9.83. Those numbers, on the surface, look expensive for a company posting a loss. But the forward picture tells a different story. According to Circle's Q4 2025 earnings press release on Business Wire, adjusted EBITDA surged 412% year over year to $167 million, with EPS of $0.43 beating the consensus forecast of $0.35 by 22.86%. The forward P/E based on 2026 analyst estimates sits at 108.70, with a PEG ratio of 4.34 per GuruFocus — high by traditional standards, but consistent with a company growing revenue at 64% annually with an expanding EBITDA margin and a market cap of roughly $28.5 billion against $1.53 billion in total cash and a debt-to-equity ratio of just 1.55%. The company is spending heavily to build infrastructure today. The question is whether Arc and the payments network generate the revenue to justify that spending. The earnings trajectory, from a $69.5 million full-year net loss to Q4 adjusted EBITDA of $167 million, suggests the inflection point is close.
I bought at approximately $52 in my Fidelity Roth IRA, one day before the stock hit its 52-week low of $51.52. Many analysts were viewing that level as critical support, with a break below potentially seeing capitulation toward the original IPO price of $31. That risk was real. The fundamentals made it worth taking.
My original intention was to hold long term. The stock ran, and I watched it push toward $85, then pull back to around $80. I remember sitting there thinking I should have sold at $85. That feeling stuck with me. Then on February 25th, everything changed.
According to Circle's official Q4 2025 earnings press release on Business Wire, the company reported Q4 EPS of $0.43, beating the analyst forecast of $0.35 by 22.86%. Revenue surged 77% year over year to $770 million with adjusted EBITDA up 412% to $167 million. For the full year, total revenue and reserve income grew 64% to $2.7 billion, with adjusted EBITDA rising 104% to $582 million. The stock jumped nearly 20% in premarket trading following the results per Yahoo Finance. The strong earnings report contributed to a roughly 30% surge in the stock following its release, with the gains primarily driven by a significant re-rating of the company's earnings multiple. Per the Motley Fool earnings call transcript, USDC in circulation reached $75.3 billion at year end, growing 72%, while on-chain USDC transaction volume in Q4 hit $11.9 trillion, up 247%. On the call, CEO Jeremy Allaire pointed to the Circle Payments Network's strong volume growth and USDC's expansion across more than 30 blockchain networks as the primary drivers of long-term value. The stock closed at $83.14 that day per Yahoo Finance. By the following session it was up 45% in less than two trading days since the report, with hedge funds that had built up significant bearish bets losing roughly $500 million in the rally, according to Bloomberg.
Then it kept going. On February 28th, per Bloomberg reporting, the US and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury against Iran. The Strait of Hormuz was effectively closed to enemy shipping, oil prices spiked toward $100 a barrel, and capital moved into crypto as a macro hedge against a suddenly fragile traditional financial system. CRCL moved with that wave. The Iran connection is not direct — Circle does not have traditional geopolitical exposure — but in an environment where cross-border payment infrastructure suddenly feels more urgent and dollar-denominated traditional finance looks more fragile, the market agreed with the thesis I had been holding for months. Within a week the stock hit $113 per Yahoo Finance. Bernstein subsequently set a street-high price target of $190 on the stock, as reported by Bloomberg. I was initially cautious seeing it open lower in premarket around $90, only to watch it push past $113 within days.
Did I leave money on the table? Yes. But the decision to sell was made with clear reasoning. I had already felt the psychological pain of watching the stock pull back from $85 to $80 without acting, and I was not going to repeat that feeling. Selling at 85% is a decision I will make every time.
The harder question is whether to rebuy on a dip and hold with the long-term conviction I originally had. The valuation at current prices demands a view on where the business is going, not where it has been. At $114 per share, the market is pricing in significant execution on Arc, continued USDC circulation growth, and the eventual margin benefit from the national trust bank charter. The average analyst price target of $124.91 implies modest upside from here, but the high estimate of $280, based on full Arc mainnet deployment and USDC market share expansion per Yahoo Finance analyst data, represents a potential further 140% from current levels. Per GuruFocus, CRCL's PE ratio is ranked worse than 100% of 556 companies in the capital markets industry, where the median sits at 17.8, but the forward earnings growth rate is what separates it from typical capital markets peers. The PEG ratio of 4.34 is elevated but comparable to other high-growth fintech infrastructure companies early in their adoption curves. Interest rate risk has not gone away. The stock's 52-week range of $49.90 to $298.99 tells you everything about how violently it moves. But if this pulls back to the $70-80 range, I want to be ready to hold it properly this time.
The trade was made inside a Roth IRA, meaning the gains are tax-free. Here is how the account's performance stacks up against major benchmarks per MSCI index data and Slickcharts:
1 Month | 3 Month | YTD | 1 Year | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
My Roth IRA | +15.51% | +20.73% | +19.99% | +69.69% |
S&P 500 | -0.4% | +0.7% | +0.7% | +17.0% |
Nasdaq | -0.9% | -2.4% | -2.4% | +21.0% |
Dow Jones | -1.3% | +2.1% | +2.1% | +13.6% |
MSCI AC World ex USA | +1.8% | +11.4% | +11.4% | +40.4% |
MSCI Emerging Markets | +2.7% | +14.4% | +14.4% | +48.6% |
CRCL was the primary driver. The rest of the portfolio holds positions in Chipotle, Cava, DoorDash, PayPal, Southwest Airlines, MercadoLibre, and a basket of Fidelity index funds. A quick note on Papa John's (PZZA), also in the portfolio — per Bloomberg reporting on March 12th, a Qatari-backed fund, Irth Capital Management, submitted a $47 per share bid to take the pizza chain private, representing a roughly 50% premium to where shares were trading before the bid emerged. The stock jumped 19% the day the news broke. That is a separate story worth covering on its own.
The research process around this trade also surfaced a broader category worth tracking — companies that are operationally winning but being de-risked by Wall Street due to rate sensitivity, shifting sentiment, or technical selling. In fintech and infrastructure, names like Coinbase, Block, Robinhood, PayPal, Nubank, and MercadoLibre all fit the profile. In AI and semiconductors, Taiwan Semiconductor, Micron, AMD, and ASML. In SaaS and cloud, Cloudflare, Datadog, Palantir, and Snowflake. These are names I will be covering on this page as I do the work. Some will make it into the portfolio. Some will not. All of it will be published here.
I am also launching a dedicated fund specifically for The Patient Idiot in the near future. Holdings, trades, and full performance will be published openly — no paywalls, no mystery. Just a real portfolio run in public, the same way I run everything else here. Subscribe now and you will be the first to know when it launches.
Sources
Circle Q4 2025 Earnings Press Release — businesswire.com
Circle Investor Relations — investors.circle.com
Motley Fool Q4 2025 Earnings Call Transcript — fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts
Yahoo Finance CRCL — finance.yahoo.com/quote/CRCL
GuruFocus CRCL Financials — gurufocus.com/term/pe/CRCL
Bloomberg Iran War Coverage — bloomberg.com
Bloomberg Papa John's Takeover Report — bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-12/papa-johns-draws-fresh-takeover-interest-from-qatari-backed-fund
Bernstein Research Price Target via Bloomberg — bloomberg.com
CoinMarketCap Bitcoin Price Data — coinmarketcap.com
MSCI Index Returns — msci.com
Slickcharts Index Performance — slickcharts.com
This post is for entertainment purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. All returns referenced are from personal accounts based on actual transactions. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Not affiliated with Circle Internet Group, Fidelity Investments, or any prop firm or brokerage firms unless explicitly stated.