Topic: How To Invest

Q: Pat, I’ve been watching PayPal for some time (some years, in fact!) and I notice it has dropped a great deal since mid-2021. Is it time to buy?

Article Excerpt

A: PayPal Holdings Inc., $118.23, symbol PYPL on Nasdaq (Shares outstanding: 1.2 billion; Market cap: $142.0 billion; www.paypal.com), remains a buy, but only for aggressive investors. The company gives investors a way to tap into the fast-growing field of online transaction processing. The stock dropped from $120 to $80 following the arrival of COVID. It then rose to $310 last August. Since then, it has dropped sharply, along with many other platform/online related stocks. The latest decline came after PayPal scaled back its growth targets for 2022. The pandemic helped fuel PayPal’s growth in the past two years as more people shifted to online shopping. However, those users are now buying fewer goods and services. Reasons include rising inflation and the end of government support payments—as well as a return to in-person work, shopping, dining and so on. The company added 48.9 million new users in 2021. In 2022, it now expects to add between 15 million and 20 million new users. As well,…