SHOP has been on a tear since the crash in December last year, currently up 160% in the last six months. It’s easy enough to cry ‘bubble’ at a glance, especially when zooming out reveals a jaw-dropping 1600%+ return in the last 3 ½ years. The stock is experiencing growth that surpasses even AMZN, and in most ways appears to exhibit the same exponential increase in earnings.
Comparing a bit, Shopify has not yet reached the revenue that Amazon was pulling in back in 2005, but at its current pace this will be overcome within a year. Prior to that period in the early 2000s Amazon saw similar increase in its stock price, followed by a long period of volatility and decline until half of those gains had been clawed back. It takes time for the gamblers to move on and for more stable investors to show up and provide a bottom. This is the growing pains of every wildly successful investment. Shopify is no exception to this principle.
Currently where it sits, Shopify is twice as expensive as Amazon was at a similar point, but this makes sense given that we’ve seen the outcome of Amazon already and expectations are increased. My reservations about SHOP are entirely due to the pace of this stock’s increase, not due to the fundamental reasoning being wrong.
I feel that referring to SHOP as a bubble is akin to calling Bitcoin a bubble. It may be experiencing a bubble for the moment, but it’s a natural event when logarithmic growth collides with linear systems. Events like this don’t end with the bubble bursting unless the timeframe of the evaluation is as short a duration as the hype and despair. The expected outcome for this stock is very different based on if we’re speaking of six months or six years from now.
I’ve marked a few spots on this graph that I think are worth watching. The top arrow represents the line of the current trend. Breaking this means we will likely drop to the second arrow for a small correction.
The pullback I’m referring to though is quite a bit larger. The 3rd and 4th arrow down are where I expect us to return to, and the point at which I would be willing to invest in SHOP for the long-term. The 3rd is the 200-day MA which would represent another solid leg up in the price, while the bottom is SHOP’s lowest trend-line which would come of frenzied selling.
Overall from the numbers SHOP seems an incredibly solid choice, but I cannot buy into hype. Every moment of excitement is counterbalanced with despair, and the tab is being run up very quickly here.