Whether the markets were going up or down, one segment of the bitcoin industry has been consistently making serious money, trading venues. This has caused more companies to want to join the party and on the way offer stock investors exposure to the bitcoin ecosystem regardless of what some regulators think. This seems to be paying off now in the case of Square.
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Square Inc (NYSE:SQ), the developer of the mobile payment app Square Cash, has seen its stock price jump up by about 5% on Wednesday. The spike was largely credited to a note by Nomura Instinet analyst Dan Dolev, who offered clients a very optimistic prediction for the effect of adding bitcoin trading by the company ahead of its May 2nd first quarter earnings report.
The ability to buy and sell bitcoin directly on the mobile payments platform has been added to the Square app earlier this year. The analyst said that the additional revenue per user from this could amount to $125 every year. He raised his SQ’s price target to $65, implying a 30% upswing, after the company already saw its stock raise almost 50% year to date.
“Either way, SQ’s fundamentals should keep improving,” Dolev said. “We expect fundamentals to continue to improve helped by SQ’s accelerating share gains and mix shift to large sellers. We continue to expect net yield to expand (from 1.05% in 1Q17 to 1.09%) helped by growing penetration of higher priced products more than offsetting mix shift to larger sellers.”
Bullish CEO
Square is headed by Jack Dorsey, who is CEO of both Twitter and the payments platform. Last month he took a very bullish long term stand on bitcoin, predicting it can the world’s single currency in the next ten years.
Explaining how bitcoin could drive Square earnings, Dolev commented: “Will Bitcoin reshape the future of payments as CEO Dorsey often argues, or is it a passing fad? In reality, SQ’s correlation with Bitcoin has been on a downward trend. Plus, the stock is now less correlated with Bitcoin than PYPL, the payment networks or GOOG. Regardless, we estimate that opening Square Cash for Bitcoin trading earlier this year could drive a sizable boost to revenue and profits, driving up to 10% potential upside to adj. EBITDA guidance. This can help offset rising investment costs required to broaden Square’s international presence.”
Should more stock investors add SQ to their portfolios? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.
Images courtesy of Shutterstock.
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