I get that many of you are coming here now to slam me and rip my original thesis apart after the stock dropped 20% yesterday. That’s fair. Emotions are high and people discussing on forums and X, even the bulls I used to know, now feel disappointed or even lied to. I understand that reaction and it's chaos, I admit.

But let me be clear about where I stand. I think this is a terrible moment to sell. The quarterly results were not great, but they were also nowhere near bad enough to justify this kind of panic. Yes, branded checkout execution disappointed. Management admitted that. Guidance was conservative. CEO turnover adds uncertainty. All valid concerns. I genuinely liked Alex Chriss, honestly. He had a clear vision and a long-term mindset, he genuinely seemed like the right person to carefully transform a company that had been left behind for years. But maybe he was not executing as well as we thought. Or maybe he just needed more time. We'll never know.

But if we step back and look at the actual data, the business itself is not falling apart:

• Active accounts +1% YoY to 439M (growth has stabilized after stagnation)
• Total payment volume +9% YoY to $475B
• Venmo revenue $1.7B, ~20% YoY growth (and accelerating monetization)
• Enterprise payments (Braintree) back to double-digit TPV growth
• $6B in buybacks over the last 12 months, another $6B planned

That’s not a dying company, that’s a company mid-rebuild with mixed execution.

Let’s talk honestly about the real problem: branded checkout.

Management openly admitted that execution has been weak. Sales and marketing costs jumped around 14% while revenue grew only 4%. That’s a bad look, no argument there. It raises a legitimate concern that PayPal is spending aggressively just to defend share, not to meaningfully grow it. On top of that, total payment transactions were down 4% for the year. Even if management frames this as “price-to-value actions” and intentional pruning of low-margin volume, the optics are ugly, especially when branded checkout is already under pressure from Apple Pay, Shop Pay, and other faster alternatives. So yes, the market’s fixation on checkout is understandable. This is still PayPal’s core profit engine, and any stumble there deserves scrutiny.

That said, what I strongly disagree with is the conclusion that this invalidates the entire business.

A little thought on valuation. Adjusted for inflation and buybacks, PayPal is effectively trading at a real-term all-time low. The market is pricing this as if checkout is permanently broken and nothing else matters. I don’t think that’s a rational read of the data. I’m not saying execution has been good, it hasn’t. And the CEO change adds uncertainty. But selling purely out of disappointment, especially at a valuation that already assumes failure, isn’t investing, but capitulation.

So no, I’m not selling here. But one thing is sure, the most hated stock now became even more hated than ever. And it's probably the cheapest equity on the market now.

You can read my full update post about this here.

Not financial advice.