$PYPL TOP 20

$PYPL have just completed their Investor Day and the price is now up +3% in the PM now. The timing of the investor day has aligned nicely with the hold on the $75 support level.

I would expect a bounce to $85 next.

Barrons have done a recap:

A new merchant platform called PayPal Open, which unifies many of its offerings including Braintree, Complete Payments, and Hyperwallet.

"With PayPal Open, businesses, including developers and partners, will easily be able to discover and integrate commerce enablement tools, ranging from payments to financial services to risk solutions, from the PayPal ecosystem," the company said in a press release. "Additionally, this platform integrates with external commerce partners, so merchants can plug-and-play with existing third-party tools to fit their unique business needs."

Separately, PayPal announced a partnership with payments tools company Verifone to bring payment acceptance solutions to enterprise merchants. And finally, it announced an agreement with J.P. Morgan Payments to offer Fastlane — a one-click guest checkout system — to merchant clients in the UK and Europe.

And though announcements are great, Wall Street tends to place more importance on financial targets, which the company provided as well:

• High single-digit growth in transaction margin dollars by 2027, with hopes for 10% growth and above in the longer term;

• Operating expense growth at less than half the rate of growth in transaction margin dollars growth;

• Adjusted earnings-per share growth in the low teens and above by 2027, with hopes for 20% and higher in the longer term; and

• Increasing free cash flow in line with net income and distributing up to 70% to 80% of free cash flow annually, with a near-term focus on stock buybacks.

Operating expense as a percentage of revenue is forecast to be flat to down in 2025, compared with 28% growth last year. It said it expects annual growth of 8% to 10% in total branded checkout payment volume by 2027, among other financial guidance.

Earlier this month, the company easily beat quarterly estimates for earnings and sales. It issued solid financial guidance, but it wasn't enough to boost the stock.

For its fourth quarter, PayPal reported adjusted earnings of $1.19 per share, beating Wall Street's call for $1.12, according to FactSet. Net revenue of $8.37 billion was above the consensus estimate for $8.26 billion.

Total payment volume increased 7% to $437.8 billion, while transaction margin dollars rose 7% to $3.9 billion.

"We set out at the beginning of 2024 to narrow our focus, improve execution, and reposition the business," CEO Alex Chriss said in a statement at the time. "One year later, I'm proud that we've laid a strong foundation for long-term, profitable growth across the company's most important areas."

"The improvements we made to branded checkout, peer-to-peer, and Venmo, plus the progress we made on our price-to-value strategy, are beginning to show up in our results," he continued. "The strong momentum we've created sets us up well for 2025, which is about scaling adoption."

The company reaffirmed its financial guidance for 2025 on Tuesday.

With an investor day slide deck boasting hundreds of pages, PayPal has provided a lot of information for investors to wade through. But the point is simple: The company is building upon a collection of innovations unveiled in January 2024 that were meant to redefine its role in the payments space.

At the time, mere concepts didn't impress Wall Street, but now PayPal is armed with growth metrics and goals analysts can analyze and interpret.

At first glance, that sounds like a win.