Pinterest Stock Rises On New Analyst Coverage: Retail’s Not Convinced

Pinterest stock was up nearly 1% on Friday morning after TD Cowen initiated coverage of the stock, but retail sentiment inched down.

TD Cowen analyst John Blackledge gave a ‘Buy’ rating and issued a $38 price target, The Fly.com reported. The firm's survey data reportedly shows Pinterest "over-indexes on product discovery use cases relative to other Social Platforms” that it sees as a tailwind for monetization. 

According to the survey, 44% of U.S. Pinterest users visit the platform to "find or shop for products," more than double the same metric for other social networks like Reddit, Facebook and Instagram, the report added.

Pinterest is also pumping “billions of user actions into its artificial intelligence models” to push more personalized and relevant content.

Retail sentiment on the stock was 'bearish' compared to 'neutral' a week ago.
 

PINS sentiment meter and message volumes on Nov 29

One Stocktwits user suggested the stock's price represented a buying opportunity, while another was optimistic about the next quarter.

For its most recent quarter, Pinterest posted $898.37 million in revenues, beating the $896.89 million that analysts were expecting. Its earnings per share of $0.40 also beat consensus estimates.

“Our AI investments are driving results by powering better personalized experiences and greater performance for advertisers, with our lower-funnel ad tools being the fastest-growing part of our business," Pinterest CEO Bill Ready said at the time of its last earnings. 

Pinterest estimates its fourth quarter revenue to come between $1.125 billion and $1.145 billion. These would be slightly below the analyst consensus of $1.148 billion.

Pinterest stock is down 15.4% year-to-date.

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