not vested
PayPal HoldingsPayPal has endured one heck of a roundtrip. Shares catapulted to north of $300 during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. They have now shed approximately 80% of their value on the heels of increasing competition and concerns about historically high inflation.
The latter is worrisome in the sense that higher inflation reduces people’s discretionary spending power. Since PayPal is a usage-based operating model, fewer transactions wouldn’t be good news.
For example, gross domestic product for the U.S. economy retraced during the first and second quarters of 2022. Despite this, currency-neutral total payment volume (TPV) traversing PayPal’s digital networks (primarily PayPal and Venmo) still rose by 13% in 2022 and another 12% during the March-ended quarter in 2023.
Think about it this way: If TPV can sustain double-digit growth through historically high inflation and an uncertain economic environment, imagine how strong TPV will be when the U.S. enters another one of its multiyear economic expansions.
PayPal’s user engagement has been steadily improving, too. Active accounts were averaging fewer than 41 transactions over the trailing 12-month (TTM) period when 2020 came to a close. As of the end of March 2023, these same active accounts were averaging more than 53 transactions over the TTM.
I’d also add that the digital payments landscape is still very much in its infancy. Adoption is growing, with Boston Consulting Group (BCG) forecasting a sixfold increase in global fintech revenue from $245 billion in 2022 to $1.5 trillion by 2030. Even if BCG’s estimate is only somewhat in the ballpark, the consensus is for sustained double-digit growth in the fintech arena as adoption picks up.
Lastly, PayPal is historically cheap. Shares can be picked up right now for about
11 times forward-year consensus earnings. That compares to an average forward-year price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio of 35 over the past five years. In other words, there’s a very good reason I’ve made PayPal a top-10 holding.
Source: Daily Trade Alert
https://dailytradealert.com/2023/06/18/ ... 023-began/
It's all about "how much you made when you were right" & "how little you lost when you were wrong"