Faced with some stiff competition that that will take a chunk of of their business [Apple Pay, Samsung Pay and Android Pay for example] I don't believe that Paypal is poised for growth in the near future. Yes one won't lose money should their invest in the company but you shouldn't expect to make too much.
More and more online money sites are beginning to try and compete with PayPal, so while I think its a good buy at the moment, its something I'd have to keep an eye on because of the market competition. At the moment PayPal seems to be the best site out there, so the stock should rise, slowly but steadily. It only takes one knock though, one of these other companies to come up with a new idea and you could be looking at making a loss quite quickly.
I'm going to wait a while before making a decision on going long here. I can't justify a $50 bil market cap at this point. I'm guessing that it's likely to be quite a bit cheaper a little ways down the road, the same way they almost all are once insiders have sold and a couple of quarters of earnings (or a lack thereof) have been reported.
As an avid Paypal user -- I work online and get most of my money through Paypal -- I have a personal, vested interest in how this is going to work out. I think things will actually go well for Paypal. I am thinking hard about investing in them.
I have used PayPal for years and really trust this site. It is the only online pay site I use right now because the others are still too new for me to put confidence in. They have great customer service and I have never once had issues with my money. I am not sure that I would invest a lot of money to own pieces of the company. I might by a share or 2.
Yeah, the one issue with paypal is that in many countries you cannot unload your money into a checking account. I have a USA account, so I am fine, but where I live, the people can only transfer money INTO their paypal accounts from their checking accounts, they can then never actually retrieve that money, only spend it from their paypal accounts. So for instance, work from home type jobs that pay you into your paypal account are not nearly as desirable here unless you found some work-around to buy something with your paypal account that could later be sold or transferred to you. I think Paypal is a great service but I have yet to see growth plan or story on how they are going to grow the company that would justify it´s high valuation now. And like JR said, in a year ( or whatever the date is), there are going to be a ton of insiders unloading. I would not buy Paypal unless I knew that blackout date, and would wait until after it had past.
Yeah paypal is a bit strange with their policy towards different countries. For example one simply CANNOT change their address to a different country in paypal. When moving abroad you have to transfer your paypal balance out, close the account and create a new one. That is a lot of work simply to get your address right... it's ridiculous. But to be honest the above is the only thing I've had issues with while using paypal.
It's interesting that PayPal decided to go public now, after years of operation. It makes me wonder how viable the business model is and why they decided to do after this long. After all, they've been around for at least 10 years, and they do millions of dollars of transactions every day. I just don't understand why they've decided to go public now. It is kind of strange.
They were public. Then they were bought by ebay and now the management of ebay has estimated that it's best if the companies separate once again. For the reasons behind this latest separation.. I don't know exactly.
The reason for this is that Paypal is a different company in each country. IMHO it is no different than, for example, Visa. I have held Visa cards as a resident in three different countries. Each card had to be applied for as if I was a totally new customer with zero track record holding the card and a very small credit limit until I had the card for several years. I assume it is because each national sector of the company operates under specific domestic laws and treaties. And trying to simultaneously meet the often mutually exclusive and conflicting national requirements of 200 companies would be impossible, so they each are ring-fenced to operate independently.
