Roku may have just become the most polarizing stock on Wall Street
There's a battle in your living room... TV dominated family attention for the last 60+ years — now cord-cutters are moving in. Roku's adorable dongle is the #1 streaming stick in the US, but its competition includes Amazon's Fire stick, Apple TV, and even Comcast (the cable OG offers a streaming box to all internet customers). They're the 700-channel bundles to Roku's single antenna.
If you think House of Cards got boring... just watch Roku's stock instead. We noticed that shares dropped 15% Monday, but then bounced up 6% on Tuesday. That's because 2 analysts at 2 different banks had 2 completely opposite interpretations of where Roku shares are going:
- Down?: A Morgan Stanley analyst blamed "overall exuberance over all things streaming” for his Roku stock downgrade.
- Up?: An analyst at Needham thinks Roku is the YouTube of streaming — just like YouTube became the default for homemade cat videos, Roku is cord-cutters' future go-to destination for Chef's Table.
Roku reveals the nuances of analyst ratings... One is a stock upgrade and one is a downgrade, but they're basically arguing whether Roku is great or incredible. Roku controls TV sets for 32M households and the stock has already quadrupled this year to $145. One analyst thinks it's worth $110/share, the other says $200/share — either way, it's a top stock of 2019.