InvestCopilot

AI-powered stock analysis in 30 seconds. 4 analysts. 1 verdict. Cut through the noise. 🧭 Launching soon! 🚀

[InvestCopilot @InvestCopilot]

5/ 📊 THE BIGGER PICTURE:

Consider rotating OUT of:
❌ Hope (software multiples)
❌ Unprofitable AI dreams

Consider rotating INTO:
✅ Tangible assets
✅ Infrastructure
✅ Monopolistic advantages
✅ Pricing power

Inflation may not be dead, just resting.

Not everyone wins in AI—likely only those with real moats.

⚠️ Not investment advice. Do your own research. ⚠️

[InvestCopilot @InvestCopilot]

🚨 Tech just got absolutely destroyed today:

• $AMD -17%
• Semis -10-17%
• Nasdaq -1.8%

But S&P breadth stayed POSITIVE and energy ripped +3.3%

Something major is shifting.

Here's what our Head of Research is saying 🧵👇

[InvestCopilot @InvestCopilot]

4/ 💰 MORE POTENTIAL PLAYS:

🪙 GOLD
Breaking $5,000, DB targeting $6,000
Central banks accumulating at record pace

💎 SEMIS
Entire complex -10-17% on single guide-down
$NVDA LEAPs 18mo out could be interesting

₿ BITCOIN (for those who have the stomach for it)
$73K pullback may be classic bull consolidation

[Dan Ives @DivesTech]

While the software complex has become a “Do Not Enter” zone over the past month, we believe there are winners and opportunities in software space. These are the Top 5 Software Names that we believe are the top names to own in this software apocalypse: MSFT, PLTR, CRWD, SNOW, CRM

[David Marcus @davidmarcus]

A few thoughts about PayPal, nearly 12 years after I left.

I woke up this morning to dozens of messages from former PayPal colleagues. It pushed me to finally speak up.

I never spoke publicly about the company after I left. Part of that was loyalty to John Donahoe, who gave me an unlikely opportunity, handing the reins of PayPal to a startup guy who, on paper, had no business running a then 15,000-person organization. But part of it was something else: I had left. I chose not to stay and fight for the changes I believed in. Speaking from the sidelines felt like armchair commentary. Easy opinions without the burden of execution. So I stayed quiet.

But twelve years of silence is long enough. And today's news makes it clear the pattern I've watched unfold isn't self-correcting.

I left PayPal in 2014 because I was deeply frustrated. We had executed a silent turnaround of a company that had lost its soul. We brought back engineering talent, shipped good products quickly, and acquired Braintree and Venmo. The company was on a tear. So much so that Carl Icahn felt compelled to accumulate a position in eBay and push for a PayPal spinoff. At the time, eBay decided to fight Icahn.

It was a difficult period for me, caught between what I felt was right for PayPal and my loyalty to the eBay team.

This is when Mark Zuckerberg approached me to join Facebook. The combination of his conviction that messaging would become foundational, the appeal of going back to building products at scale, and my growing exhaustion with the internal politics at PayPal and eBay eventually convinced me to leave and join one of the best teams in the world, one I had admired for a long time.

In the summer of 2014, I met John in a café in Portola Valley and told him I had decided to leave. During that conversation, he told me that Icahn had effectively won the fight, that PayPal was going to become an independent company, and he tried to convince me to stay on as CEO, but I had already said yes to Mark, and my word is my bond. There was no turning back.

After my departure, the board scrambled to find a replacement, and it took a few months for them to land on Dan Schulman. The leadership style shifted from product-led to financially-led. Over time, product conviction gave way to financial optimization.

Much of the momentum we had created still persisted and carried the company forward, mainly driven by Bill Ready, who came over in the Braintree acquisition and rose to COO. Under his leadership, Venmo grew exponentially, and total payment volume (TPV) accelerated quickly. But the shift under Schulman became more pronounced after Bill's departure at the end of 2019. With him went the product conviction that had defined the post-spinoff momentum. Then, for a period, COVID-fueled online shopping hid a lot of the company's new weaknesses.

During that period, the company made a fundamental miscalculation: it optimized for payment volume instead of margin and differentiation. It leaned into unbranded checkout, where PayPal had the least leverage, instead of branded checkout, where the margin, data, and customer relationship actually lived.

Visa masterfully structured a deal that effectively ended PayPal's ability to steer customers toward bank-funded transactions, which had been a core driver of PayPal's economics. Not long after, PayPal lost a significant portion of eBay's volume. Over time, it saw its share of checkout among its most profitable customers steadily erode as Apple Pay and others continued to execute well.

The same pattern repeated itself across lending, buy-now-pay-later (BNPL), and new rails.

On lending, PayPal missed the opportunity to turn it into a platform weapon. Products like Working Capital were conservative, short-duration, and optimized for loss minimization. Lending never became programmable, never became identity-driven, and never became a reason for merchants or consumers to choose PayPal over something else.

The missed opportunity in BNPL was even more striking. Klarna, Affirm, and Afterpay didn't just offer installment payments, they built consumer finance brands, persistent credit identities, and new shopping behaviors. PayPal saw the BNPL turn, entered the market, and had every advantage: distribution, trust, and merchant relationships. But BNPL was treated as a defensive checkout feature rather than an offensive category. There was no attempt to turn it into a core consumer relationship, no super-app behavior, and no meaningful differentiation for merchants. Others built platforms, PayPal added a feature.

The failure to lean into building and owning new rails followed the same logic. After the spinoff, PayPal had a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build a global, at scale payment network. Instead, the company focused on building on top of existing networks and third-party rails.

More recently, that mindset carried over to PYUSD. Technically, the product was sound. Strategically, it launched without a compelling transactional reason to exist. PYUSD had distribution, but no organic demand. It was not embedded deeply enough into flows to become a true settlement layer, a cross-border merchant rail, or a programmable money primitive. It sat adjacent to the product instead of inside the core of it.

Acquisitions during this period followed a similar pattern. Honey was not a strategic acquisition for PayPal. It added activity, but not leverage. It lived outside the transaction, monetized affiliate economics rather than payment economics, and never meaningfully strengthened PayPal's control of the customer or the checkout moment. Xoom solved a real problem in remittances, but it never compounded PayPal's advantage. It scaled volume without changing the underlying rails, identity graph, or settlement model, and as importantly, it didn’t cater to a high-value, high-margin customer archetype.

None of these were bad companies. They were just a wrong fit for PayPal and became unnecessary distractions.

The board eventually recognized the problem. In 2023, they brought in Alex Chriss, an Intuit veteran with a strong product background, explicitly to restore product conviction. It was the right instinct.

But Alex came from software, not payments. He understood SMB product development. He didn't have the muscle memory for transaction economics, network effects, or settlement infrastructure.

In hindsight, he also made an error: clearing out much of the leadership team that understood payments deeply. Executives with years of institutional knowledge departed within his first year.

This morning, Alex was removed as CEO. Branded checkout grew 1% last quarter. The board tapped another operator, Enrique Lores, the former HP CEO who's been on the PayPal board for five years.

I don’t know Enrique. And he might be a great leader, but on paper at least, he’s a hardware executive. For a payments company.

The common thread through all of this is incentive design. Once PayPal became independent, short/medium-term predictability beat long-term vision and ambition. Stock performance mattered more than platform risk and network opportunity. Financial optimization replaced product conviction.

I'm not claiming I would have made every call differently. Running a public company at scale involves tradeoffs I didn't have to make after I left. But the pattern, choosing predictability over platform risk, again and again, was a choice, not an inevitability.

Over time, the company that had every advantage and could’ve become the most consequential and relevant payments company of our time, lost its mojo, its product edge, and its ability to compete in a market that’s being rewired and reinvented in front of our eyes.

That's the part that's hardest to watch for a company I care so deeply about.

[InvestCopilot @InvestCopilot]

Great analysis and worth a read 👇🏼

[amit @amitisinvesting]

$HOOD

Let's talk about the Robinhood selloff.

So, this is confusing on multiple levels but I will try to breakdown what I think is happening.

- First, I discussed this in my end of year substack but I had hedged a majority of my position with deep ITM calls. The reasoning behind this was seeing the lack of crypto volatility and realizing that could unjustifiably hurt $HOOD but also because the position had become too big for me to go to sleep easily at night without hedging it. That decision ended up helping out through this volatility.

- The core reason for this drawdown seems to be, in my opinion, two things: 1) crypto meltdown as $HOOD is associated with crypto and 2) the street potentially thinking that trading volumes have topped for the cycle. Let's discuss both of these things. In terms of crypto, yes...it's ugly. Robinhood make a good chunk of crypto being traded and it is very high margin. Now, prediction markets have also been strong but I don't think they can compensate for all of the crypto momentum slowing down, especially if sports tend to slow down in Q2, but it is still a positive tailwind. More broadly, what helped HOOD gain momentum back in 2023/2024 was $BTC also gaining strength. Unfortunately, the downside volatility on Bitcoin seems to be applying to HOOD as well. In terms of trading volumes drying up, I don't know if thats true...we will find out when we get more data, but the market is acting if that is true which is weird given how much volatility we have had.

- Now, it is weird to see HOOD get hit the hardest when names like COIN aren't down as hard even though they are more correlated to crypto. Multiple analysts have come out to say that this feels unjustified and unwarranted but I guess this is how the market is interpreting it.

- The other weird thing about the sell off is that high-beta stocks have had a massive move...HOOD is a high beta name and more importantly the home for all of the high beta names being traded but STILL the market does not care. It's weird. There is a disconnect but the stock has not been treated as a name that benefits from this.

- Valuation. HOOD has an aggressive multiple, part of the reason for that is because of growth, innovation, product velocity, etc. But, like many names that did amazing last year, it's almost like the street does not care. This is weird considering the street is giving random names 200 times sales multiples because they are in the right theme, but that is not happening with many favorites of last year and as a result, if the valuation normalizes and we see multiple compression, that could be the streets way of taking profits and rotating. I don't think Robinhood has given any reason to, but that may be the issue here.

- I believe this company is generational and is building out multiple elements to the business that aren't contingent on just trading volumes, however, the street may disagree. If they see it only as a crypto trading app then if crypto volumes go down, HOOD goes down. Vlad is building a company for the next 20 years and I know how hard he and the team works to put out incredible products, it's just the effect of those products being outside of trading volumes may not be what the street is seeing in the short term (again very weird because thats not what the issue was just 2 months ago) but in the long term that will continue to make HOOD a generational compounding machine.

Maybe earnings will change sentiment but as of now it is confusing why the stock is getting hit so hard. Bought a little bit of the dip but if crypto keeps going down, it might take HOOD down with it. Earnings should be very strong, just a very weird way for the street to interpret what's happening with HOOD this year.

[Sergey @SergeyCYW]

PayPal Q4’25 Earnings: Is the Growth Story Breaking?

$PYPL PayPal’s Q4’25 report triggered a sharp market reaction, with the stock falling roughly 15% after earnings. The headline numbers explain why. Revenue reached $8.7B, growing modestly year over year, but still missing expectations. Non-GAAP EPS also came in below consensus, reinforcing concerns that topline growth is no longer translating into earnings leverage.

At first glance, operational activity looked healthy. Total payment volume rose 8.5% YoY, indicating that PayPal remains deeply embedded in global digital commerce flows. U.S. revenue growth outpaced international markets, and other services revenue posted double-digit expansion, showing some success in diversification beyond core transactions. In addition, aggressive share repurchases meaningfully reduced both basic and diluted share counts, offering mechanical EPS support.

However, these positives were overshadowed by structural weaknesses. Margins declined across the board. Operating margin, free cash flow margin, and net margin all contracted year over year, signaling rising cost pressures and limited operating leverage. Sales and marketing intensity increased, while transaction margins compressed despite a lower transaction expense rate. This combination raises questions about pricing power and competitive dynamics.

The most concerning signal came from user engagement. Payment transactions per active account declined nearly 5% YoY, continuing a multi-quarter trend. While active accounts and total transactions still grew, the fall in engagement suggests that incremental growth is becoming harder to monetize. In mature payment platforms, declining usage intensity often precedes slower revenue growth.

[InvestCopilot @InvestCopilot]

$PLTR crushed Q4:
- Revenue: $1.41B (beat by $80M)
- EPS: $0.25 (beat by $0.02)
- Gov't growth: +66%
- Net income: $608M (8x YoY)
- Stock: +5% AH

Karp: Demand so strong they're delaying sales to allies. 200x P/E still the elephant in the room.

2026 Revenue Guidance: $7.18B-$7.20B (+60% YoY)
2026 Adj. FCF: $3.9B-$4.1B (55% FCF Margin)
🤯

[InvestCopilot @InvestCopilot]

📅 Massive week ahead for markets:

EARNINGS:
- Mon: $PLTR (after close)
- Tue: $GOOG, $AMD
- Wed: $QCOM, $ARM
- Thu: $AMZN, $AAPL

MACRO:
- Jobs report Friday
- ISM Manufacturing today
- Fed speakers all week

Markets nervous. This week sets Feb's tone.

[Sykodelic 🔪 @Sykodelic_]

I would not ignore this.

There are rumblings that the ISM data being released tomorrow is going to come in above 50, with some estimates even over 51.

If that happens, it is very significant.

Here we have:
- Bitcoin
- Copper/Gold
- ISM/PMI

For those who are unaware, the ISM reading is essentially whether the economy is in contraction or expansion based on manufacturing. A reading of under 50 is contraction, and over 50 is expansion.

You can see here very clearly, every single time since Bitcoins inception, when ISM has pushed back towards the 52 level after being in contraction(under 50), it has marked that:

1. The Bottom is in for COPPER/GOLD
2. Bitcoin has begun its true expansion phase

You will notice that the PMI reading has been in by far its longest contraction ever, and this is a key piece of data that explains why this bull cycle has been so different.

It is the first time ever that Bitcoin has made new highs whilst the PMI has been in contraction.

It explains why this bull cycle has been so weak because the foundational state of the economy/liquidity has not been there to support it.

Its not a coincidence, by any means.

In addition, this is all happening as GOLD has very likely finished its mega run, meaning COPPER/GOLD is very likely bottomed, with COPPER pushing, in line with high manufacturing and development business happening...

Contributing towards the increasing PMI.

Just as Bitcoin is approaching its invalidation levels for HTF structure break, and almost everyone has now succumb to a year long bear market.

All of this is linked together and telling us the same story.

If PMI comes in close to 52 tomorrow, I expect this to be a market shock and begin the reversal phase throughout Feb.

This is data that truly matters.

[zerohedge @zerohedge]

What's working in 2026? What worked in 2025

[InvestCopilot @InvestCopilot]

Really interesting piece - well done.

“The divergence may be signaling a broader market repricing: companies that benefited from opacity vs. companies that provide visibility. If AI-powered oversight becomes the norm across federal spending, this dynamic could play out across many sectors, not just healthcare.”

$PLTR $HUM 👀

[InvestCopilot @InvestCopilot]

@Mr_Derivatives It’s gonna be a wild week. Lock in! 🔒

[InvestCopilot @InvestCopilot]

6/
The setup for value investors:

Entry: $51.50-$52.50
Stop: $50.50 (4% risk)
Target: $60-$65 (15-25% upside)

Risk/reward: 4:1

*Not financial advice. Just math.

[InvestCopilot @InvestCopilot]

1/
$PYPL reports earnings Tuesday and is trading at 52-week lows.

P/E: 10x
ROE: 24%
FCF Yield: 14%
RSI: 28 (oversold)

The market hates this stock. Here's why value investors are paying attention 🧵

[InvestCopilot @InvestCopilot]

5/
The chart is brutal but interesting:

• RSI at 28 = extremely oversold
• Trading at 52-week lows ($52)
• 21% below 200-day MA

Either a falling knife or a generational entry.

Earnings Tuesday will tell us which.