Good morning!
Small timeline:
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Verifone (PAY) was acquired in early April.
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Square (SQ) acquires Weebly in late April (to round out itself in eCommerce, which was its weakness vs Shopify)
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PayPal acquires iZettle in May (to compete with SQ where they failed in the past with its homegrown product). iZettle was about to IPO with a 1.1bn valuation, PYPL pays 2.2bn for it. If this is overpaying, it signals a validation of SQ's business model, and that PYPL is giving up on their homegrown stuff (called PayPal Here).
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Square just yesterday issues $750 in convertible notes (I have a lot of speculation on this one, but something big is brewing)
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Adobe acquired Magento today (SHOP stock way down on the news)
Earlier, when Amazon mulled p2p payments (Square has Cash App, PYPL has Venmo), both stocks dip on the announcement, which was otherwise pretty hollow PR. Amazon actually had a Square/iZettle competitor called Amazon Register that they shut down back in 2015, so I would not be surprised if they want to get back into transaction spaces. Also wouldn't be surprised if they made a bid for SHOP or SQ within 2 years in order to get into eCommerce and small biz tech generally.
Both SQ and SHOP and PYPL have had nice years, stock price wise. But on the 52week SQ is up most of alll:
$SQ: +169.2%
$PYPL: +63.3%
$SHOP: +61.3% (this was higher until very recently)
$PAY: 28.7% - Even though its getting acquired, investors have barely made any money in the last year compared to the other three!
Disclosure: I'm watching this space very closely and am long SQ, AMZN. (edit: and now a very small call position in SHOP as of ten seconds ago, intended to be short term because of today's perceived overreaction. This is more of a bet than a position. I will not be long SHOP long term.)
Submitted May 22, 2018 at 11:39AM by simonsarris https://ift.tt/2IYvkxO