What Happened?

Shares of buy now, pay later company Affirm (NASDAQ: AFRM) jumped 5.8% in the afternoon session after the company announced an expanded partnership with global payment services provider Worldpay. 

The new agreement integrated Affirm's buy now, pay later (BNPL) services into Worldpay's embedded payments offering for software platforms. This move allowed the more than 1,000 software companies using Worldpay's platform to offer Affirm as a payment method to their merchants. By doing so, Affirm significantly broadened its reach to a large network of businesses and their end customers, providing them with more flexible payment options. To put the scale of this partnership into perspective, Worldpay's platform processed over $400 billion in payment volume across 4.6 billion transactions in the previous 12 months. This collaboration enhanced Affirm's presence and usability within the payments industry.

After the initial pop the shares cooled down to $75.40, up 4.8% from previous close.

Is now the time to buy Affirm? Access our full analysis report here.

What Is The Market Telling Us

Affirm’s shares are extremely volatile and have had 55 moves greater than 5% over the last year. In that context, today’s move indicates the market considers this news meaningful but not something that would fundamentally change its perception of the business.

The previous big move we wrote about was 1 day ago when the stock dropped 5.6% on the news that new trade tensions and disappointing earnings from major tech companies weighed heavily on investor sentiment. 

A key driver was the news that the White House is considering new restrictions on Chinese exports that use U.S. software, a move that could significantly impact technology companies. This uncertainty over escalating trade tensions created a broad sense of worry in the market. Simultaneously, shares of the semiconductor giant Texas Instruments dropped 6% after its latest earnings and future revenue forecast both came in weaker than expected, which is a big concern for the health of the tech industry. This poor performance from Texas Instruments immediately dragged down the entire semiconductor sector, causing other major chipmakers like Advanced Micro Devices and Micron Technology to also see significant declines. 

Compounding the bad news, streaming service Netflix saw its stock slump 9% after it missed its earnings targets, partly blaming a tax dispute in Brazil. The combined effect of renewed trade war fears and the direct evidence of underperformance from influential companies in the technology sector was enough to push the major market indexes lower.

Affirm is up 20.6% since the beginning of the year, but at $75.40 per share, it is still trading 18.2% below its 52-week high of $92.18 from September 2025. Investors who bought $1,000 worth of Affirm’s shares at the IPO in January 2021 would now be looking at an investment worth $775.40.

Today’s young investors won’t have read the timeless lessons in Gorilla Game: Picking Winners In High Technology because it was written more than 20 years ago when Microsoft and Apple were first establishing their supremacy. But if we apply the same principles, then enterprise software stocks leveraging their own generative AI capabilities may well be the Gorillas of the future. So, in that spirit, we are excited to present our Special Free Report on a profitable, fast-growing enterprise software stock that is already riding the automation wave and looking to catch the generative AI next.