Shopify Inc. (SHOP.TO)

Vulnerable to the Shorts, because the valuation is incredibly expensive. They are still not making any money. Believes the Bulls have $.20 in earnings for 2018, back-end loaded. That would mean it is trading at 600X earnings, and something like 30X EBITDA. Still too expensive and vulnerable. You could maybe trade it, but if it ever misses it would be $80 before you could shake a stick at it.

(A Past Top Pick Jan 18/17, Up 85%) It has been called a multilevel marketing company. They have never missed a quarter as a public company. There are a lot of eyes on it. They have recurring revenue. None of the allegations are new.

A great case study. Basically, traded from $15 to $120, and consolidated nicely along the way. When the Citron report came out, the stock was at $105. Fundamentally, it is a great business. The Citron report had enough holes to drive a truck through, but there is some smoke. He was stopped out at $105 and has moved on. He’ll wait and see how the company handles this. There will be more when earnings come.

A prominent short seller came out with an attack on the business model. The work was pretty sketchy in the short seller’s report. They will deal with it when they report on November 2. He continues to like it. The pull back is just a cooling off. It is a normal course correction in a stock with a high multiple. They anticipate profitability in the fourth quarter.

The short position of Mr. Andrew Left and Citron?You can’t say his news is fake news. You can say that he is delivering his opinion. He has never quite understood this company to personally get into it, but has been jealous of anybody who has. However, he has funds that hold it. The more he hears about the methodology, he wonders about the casino aspect of venture capital listing on its site, when he knows historically that 1 out of 20 venture capital used to be the rate of success. He doesn’t feel it will go higher.

By any stretch of the imagination, this is still a speculative stock. They’ve invested about $900 million, but valuation is $9 billion. Yet they haven’t earned any money and are still negative EBITDA. A game changer with a really great technology and can be widely used by many businesses. Has a good overall business model.

He would not buy it. He would want to see it stabilize more, considering the short report. He may have to buy it back higher but he would want to know they are executing. It has been unbelievable. It is volatile without short reports. You can trade it around using a tool. Once their numbers come out the stock tends to gap up. There will be a cloud over them until their next quarterly numbers come out.

One of his Top Picks about 45 days ago. Recommended it in late August and got in at a good price, and had been up 25%. He uses stop losses, and on the first tweak he saw from Citron, he exited his position. As a result, he lost 6%-7%. It is going to be a real tug-of-war for the next couple of days. All the analysts have not budged. We need to see this play out for a while. He is cheering for the company.

He is Short this, but not because of any holes in the story. It was just based on excessive valuations. Growth is still in place. In the short term, the problem is because of questions that were brought up by Citron, especially about the affiliate system, where a lot of people are setting up storefronts just to bring in others. That is not going to last. If you own, he would take a little money off the table.

Designed for merchants to end up getting payments through the web, and have been very successful at doing that. Sales have grown significantly. In 2016, they lost $.17, and the 2017 forecast is looking for a loss of $.09. In 2018 they go positive at $.21, but compared to a stock price of roughly $126, that is a pretty big multiple. Thinks that is what the big debate is about.

Analysing this, particularly on a very short-term basis, it is more than he can deal with. When it was all story, then you could at least say that maybe the story can just keep on going and the stock will keep going higher, but now somebody has taken a big bucket of mud and thrown it into the water. There will now be a period when we sort this all out, and can we filter the mud out? Is the growth story intact? The downside risk would be about $84. Fundamentally, Shopify is a brilliant concept, and should serve investors well in a long-term sense.

This is Citron Research’s latest target for Shorting. Baird & Co came out later in the day saying that his biggest arguments don’t hold water. The business model is not broken. The Seller wants to get a lot of noise out there so that the stock will go lower. Welcome to the world of concept stocks that don’t pay dividends and don’t have profits.

This has been a good Canadian story. The issue for him is, what do you pay for a good story today. It has very, very high expectations, and is part of the whole disruption world. What they do for businesses is wonderful, and they have a good lock, as proved by the fact that Amazon (AMZN-Q) uses their technology. The issue for him is valuation.

Another extremely expensive, high growth stock. They are migrating up the food chain to larger companies. It is priced for perfection. Another company could complete with them. If you have made nice money he would take the money and run.

He can’t do seasonality on this company, because you need 20 years of data. However, the chart shows that it just keeps on going higher and higher. It recently broke into an all-time high, and is outperforming the market. Momentum indicators are on the upside.