Investors are familiar with Netflix dominating the streaming space, with its 100 percent gain just this year, but a handful of other names in its universe have surged in recent months.
Pandora, Roku and Spotify have surged 71 percent, 49 percent and 19 percent, respectively, in the last three months. Spotify is the youngest public company of the bunch, debuting in a direct listing in April.
These stocks have handily benefited from an economy flooded with subscription models, said Boris Schlossberg, managing director of foreign exchange strategy at BK Asset Management. The growing popularity of subscription services, particularly across media, has been key to these names’ success.
“They are essentially trading on the fact that they are growing their subscriptions. It really doesn’t matter how profitable they are; it almost doesn’t even matter how much revenue they have. It’s the subscription growth that really attracts them, because then it makes them a candidate for M&A for, probably, old media,” he said Thursday on CNBC’s “Trading Nation.”
“Until and unless their subscription growth rate slows down, I think it’s very dangerous to short them at this point. That’s the dynamic that’s really driving them, and that’s the dynamic that could push them even higher as we go from this point,” he added.
The charts of Spotify and Roku may be difficult to technically analyze given their relatively short lives as public companies, said Matt Maley, equity strategist at Miller Tabak, but shares of Pandora appear to have more room to run. Maley noted the stock’s overbought condition, but pointed out it’s come a long way from its 63 percent decline in 2017 alone.
“Although it’s overbought on a near-term basis and could pull back a little bit here, there are a lot of reasons to think this chart could have some more upside, at least after it takes a bit of a breather,” he said Thursday on “Trading Nation,” pointing specifically to a so-called island reversal, a traditionally bullish technical signal.
