Yo Pit Crazies,

Way back when, I owned a piece of an exchange.

Exchanges were member owned then: we bought seats, and the seat holders owned the place.

My Pacific Exchange seat became Archipelago, then part of the NYSE in 2006, and ICE bought the whole thing in 2013.

We got cash for our seats, which was fine.

Then I sat there and watched the exchange value explode 10 times over as ICE took off without me.

I'm not making that mistake twice, which is where this week's first name comes from.

Oil and bonds are in play this week with the Iran conflict heating up again, PPI on Thursday and CPI on Friday.

Here are a couple of out of the box plays that work outside the bigger news.

One of the bigger advantages of Sibyl, my idea-flow tool that flags when a name inside one of my themes hits a good price, is the daily drumbeat.

I keep the themes in my head and Sibyl tells me when a stock is finally worth acting on. Not everything on the list is ready to go, but I like to cue them up anyway.

Exchanges Are Getting Frisky

Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) has its hand in anything that touches a security. It owns the NYSE, a stack of futures exchanges and clearing houses, and it just finished writing $1.6 billion in checks for a stake in Polymarket, the prediction market. Assets are going to get tokenized (turned into digital tokens that trade on a blockchain) to cut down on fraud, and ICE and Polymarket already agreed to partner on that piece of the action.

ICE is moving up my institutional accumulation list fast after making lows this year. In June the CFTC blessed bitcoin perpetual futures (futures with no expiration date) on Kalshi, and the whole exchange group sold off on the idea that the betting apps were coming for their business. ICE dropped near $122 and Cboe lost 28 percent in a month.

I gave that story zero chance and added to positions in both ICE and Cboe Global Markets (CBOE). What people forget is that an exchange's value sits in the counterparty guarantee (the clearing house stands behind every trade so nobody gets stiffed), and crypto has had some real issues with that.

The numbers back me up. ICE just reported record open interest, up 20 percent from last year, with earnings per share up 14 percent, and the board bumped the buyback to $4 billion.

Meanwhile the regulators are catching up to the betting markets: a federal appeals court ruled last month that states can police prediction markets like gambling, and New Jersey took the fight to the Supreme Court last week. CME is suing the CFTC over those perpetual futures too.

As ICE has moved up the food chain in Sibyl, that's a good sign. All but one stock Sibyl picked has been up since inception. We're riding 13 winners out of 14 closed trades, so Sibyl is as good an indicator as anything I can find.

1-Year ICE chart

Sibyl identified the classic bounce with a big jump in open interest (the number of options contracts still open, which tells me the big money is building positions). ICE is already up more than 30 percent off the summer low. With betting-market futures headed for regulatory hurdles, ICE goes back to one-year highs very soon.

This Stock's Credit Score Just Tanked

Many years ago I made markets in a stock called FAIR, Fair Isaac Inc. That was 30 years ago, and if I'd put my entire IRA in it I'd have done fine. The ticker is Fair Isaac (FICO) now because everyone knows what a FICO score is.

The stock has been a crazy growth story for years, and the crazy part is it's still growing: revenue came in 26 percent over last year in the July quarter. The problem is FICO's monopoly ended on Friday. The FHFA ordered Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to accept VantageScore 4.0, a cheaper rival score built by the three credit bureaus, from every mortgage lender, effective immediately.

Mortgage scores were FICO's highest-margin business, and its own regulator called its pricing a monopoly in public. The stock fell as much as 21 percent in one session and closed a hair above its 52-week low.

In Sibyl, I have a simple metric to gauge market reaction, and FICO was already terrible last quarter before any of this.

1 Year FICO

Valuation still hasn't caught up.

At the top last October, the market paid 40 times forward earnings for that growth.

Now it's about 22 times and still nobody wants it, because nobody knows how much of the mortgage business walks out the door.

FICO is one to avoid for a while, and it's one of only a handful of stocks near 52-week lows with 2028 options listed (so you can bet against it for a long time).

So which one does the crew pick for Monday's Ticker Highlight Show? Tap this link to join at whatever rate you want and get Monday's pick as soon as it hits.

Hopefully this was helpful,

Andrew Giovinazzi