How PayPal lagged the 2025 market rally and faces another weak year

We all just watched PayPal’ stock PYPL sit out the entirety of 2025’s bull run, even as its fellow tech stocks went utterly parabolic taking unprecedented control of the entire stock market, crypto pumped Bitcoin to an astounding $126,000, and AI took off too.

But PayPal just kept crashing. On January 9, it dropped another 1%, closing at $57.66. And this wasn’t a one-day thing. It’s been stuck in the dirt for months.

At the same time, insiders sold PYPL in Q4 2025 and none of them bought while short sellers made millions of dollars off PayPal, per data from InvestingPro.

Downgrades pile up for PayPal’s stock while retail investors loses hope

The hate online for PayPal has been nonstop. One trader on Reddit said they were down $20,000 and called it a “garbage stock,” just as Reddit sentiment score hit 12 out of 100, which frankly, that’s rock bottom. Another post blew up with 210 upvotes and 103 comments of people basically holding a support group for their losses.

The most viral post came from someone with $100,000 in the stock who wrote, “I’m down 20k on this garbage stock. Should I just sell everything and buy SPY puts? This thing is never going back up.” That guy was using 326% leverage, and the title of the post reads:- “PayPal lose, going to yolo everything.

The thing is, PayPal actually beat earnings eight out of the last nine quarters, but nobody cares since the stock keeps crashing, now down by 38% from $93.03, which was already far from its $231.38 high in 2021. The stock is now near its 52-week low of $55.72.

Wall Street is tired too, as Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America have all downgraded PYPL going into 2026.

PayPal crashed 20% in the 2018 dip, 31% in the Covid crash, and then crashed over 83% when inflation hit. It’s been nothing but pain. And even now, it trades at 10 times forward earnings with 31% quarterly earnings growth, and the market still shrugs.

Jefferies isn’t feeling it either. They kept a Hold rating and slapped on a $60 target. Right now, it trades around $58.42. That’s barely above the bottom. They also warned about Germany, where PayPal gets about 20% of its branded payment volume and 25% of transaction margin dollars. Sales there are slowing down.

They’re now calling for just 2% TPV growth, down from 5% last quarter. Even with a P/E of 11.78 and a perfect Piotroski Score of 9, nobody’s buying the story. Price targets are all over the place, from $51 to $120, and earnings drop in 35 days.

Other Wall Street analysts are divided on where PayPal goes next. Of the 44 analysts covering PayPal, 20 rate it Buy, 20 rate it Hold, and four rate it Sell, according to FactSet.

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