Big Banks Find the Consumer Is Resilient. That's Good for This Holding.

Almost a month ago, we added to the Pro Portfolio’s position in American Express (AXP) near $303, and the stock has benefited from the market’s subsequent rebound, as well as commentary about consumer spending remaining resilient.

We heard that during Bank of America’s (BAC) earnings call this week, while Wells Fargo’s (WFC) management shared its findings that “Consumers are spending more than a year ago, which includes spending more on gas, but they haven't slowed spending on everything else.”

The team at Wells also said that, “Upper income consumers continue to benefit from elevated equity prices, home equity and cash buffers accumulated earlier in the cycle, allowing discretionary spending to remain firm.”

These are supportive comments for the part of Amex’s business that's derived from member spending, which accounts for a portion of the 25%-30% pretax income not generated by net card fees. Said a slightly different way, net card fees account more than 70% of Amex’s pretax income, which is why we are focused on the Platinum card refresh and what that means for the number of cards-in-force and average fee per card.

We’ll get our next update on those figures, both of which have been steadily increasing, when Amex reports its first-quarter 2026 results on April 23. And as we think about upcoming dates for Amex, be sure to mark May 8. That’s the date the company will pay its next quarterly dividend, which was raised to $0.95 per share earlier this year.

Amex to Acquire Hypercard

You may have noticed some headlines for Amex today beyond what we discussed above. Amex is acquiring Hypercard, a move that should add to the company's AI offerings across its commercial services business, including agentic and AI-powered automation tools for businesses.

Hypercard, backed by OpenAI’s Sam Altman, was founded in 2022 to focus on making expense management a more autonomous process from a manual one. That included developing native AI agents that auto-categorize and file expenses, check them against budget and policy, and send reminders that submissions are due.

We see the acquisition as a nice win for Amex as it looks to help business clients improve productivity, but we also suspect there are likely internal productivity benefits as well. The move is also another indicator of rising AI adoption and usage in the business world, both large and small.

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At the time of publication, TheStreet Pro Portfolio was long AXP and BAC.