Block, Shopify and Stifel Financial are trading near buy points as financial stocks power higher with earnings season underway. Lululemon is trading in a buy zone after hiking its outlook earlier in the month. AppLovin rounds out this week's list of stocks to watch with results due on Feb. 12. Shopify and AppLovin also rank on the IBD Leaderboard list of top-performing stocks.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average and major stock indexes retreated Friday as the market digested President Donald Trump's plan to impose tariffs on Mexico, Canada and China starting Saturday.
Block Square and Cash App parent Block (XYZ) is now trading under the ticker XYZ after changing its symbol from SQ on Jan. 21.
The digital payments company has been on the uptrend as other financial stocks have been performing well amid earnings results.
Discover Financial Services (DFS) posted a 252% EPS gain for its Jan. 22 results, while Visa (V) and Mastercard (MA) both surged to record highs following their earnings results last week.
Shift4 Payments (Four) have both rallied about 17% so far this year. Paysafe (PSFE) and Toast (TOST) are both up 14% in 2025.
Meanwhile, Block is set to report its own Q4 results on Feb. 20. FactSet analysts project a 95% increase in earnings to 88 cents per share on 9% revenue growth to $6.29 billion.
Block also holds 8,363 bitcoin as of the third quarter as part of its long-term investment strategy. The cryptos are worth over $861 million with bitcoin trading around $103,000 on Friday.
XYZ stock was the IBD Stock Of The Day for Friday. Shares reclaimed their 50-day moving average last week, even with Friday's pullback. Investors could use its Jan. 6 high of 93.83 as an early buying opportunity.
XYZ stock is consolidating with a traditional buy point at 99.26. Shares have rebounded about 15% from their January lows.
Lululemon Lululemon (LULU) fell Friday, ending a seven-day win streak and pulling back below a 420.21 buy point from a seven-week flat base.
The current buy zone for the pattern, which extends 5% beyond the buy point, stretches to 441.22.
LULU stock has rebounded sharply from its 2024 low in early August.
The athleisure retailer in mid-January lifted its Q4 guidance based on its strong holiday performance.
Lululemon expects revenue for the January-ending fourth quarter to rise 11%-12% to $3.56 billion to $3.58 billion vs. its previous guidance of $3.475 billion to $3.51 billion. The company now forecasts earnings of $5.81-$5.85 per share, compared to its prior outlook for $5.56 to $5.64 per share. The outlook was ahead of analyst expectations.
Shopify In addition to the Leaderboard list, Shopify (SHOP) also ranks on the IBD Big Cap 20 list.
SHOP stock was added to SwingTrader on Thursday as a full position with a 119.50 entry. SwingTrader trimmed its position to 3/4 on Friday to take profit.
Shopify reversed from a three-year high on Friday, but is trading above a 115.37 buy point for a double-bottom base.
Shares have more than doubled from their 2024 low at the beginning of August.
Meanwhile, Shopify is set to report Q4 results on Feb. 11.
FactSet expects the e-commerce company to report a 26% increase in earnings to 43 cents per share on 25% revenue growth to $2.68 billion.
Cathie Wood is also an investor in Shopify. Her ARK Innovation ETF (ARKK) and ARK Next Generation Internet ETF (ARKW) hold about $292 million and $74 million worth of shares, respectively.
Stifel Financial Stifel Financial (SF) topped Q4 estimates on Wednesday with a nearly 49% increase in earnings to $2.23 per share adjusted on 19% revenue growth to $1.36 billion.
Analysts expected earnings of $1.97 per share on $1.28 billion in revenue.
Stifel's global wealth management revenues increased 13% for the quarter, while investment banking revenues spiked 49%.
The company also noted record revenue, asset management revenues and client assets for 2024.
Stifel's board authorized a 10% increase in its stock dividend to 46 cents per share starting in the first quarter.
In terms of 2025 guidance, Stifel expects net revenue to range from $5.25 billion to $5.75 billion, with $1.1 billion to $1.2 billion in net interest income.
SF stock cleared a 116.40 buy point for a cup-with-handle base on Wednesday, but just dipped below that level on Friday.
AppLovin AppLovin (APP), a mobile game and app marketing platform, was the IBD Stock Of The Day for Thursday.
APP stock has a 417.63 buy point for an eight-week consolidation. The buy point matches its record high from Dec. 6.
Shares last week flirted with their recent high of 371.77 on Jan. 22, which mark an early entry opportunity.
AppLovin provides a software platform that enables app developers to market, monetize and analyze their products. The company also makes mobile games including "Wordscapes", "Matchington Mansion" and "Game of War."
In a Jan. 25 note, Jefferies wrote that AppLovin "remains the No. 1 return on ad spend (ROAS) network for the largest spenders." The company should also benefit from accelerating mobile ad spending growth in 2025, the firm added.
For its Q4 results on Feb. 12, FactSet expects earnings increase 155% to $1.25 per share on 32% revenue growth to $1.26 billion.
Square-parent Block (XYZ) on Thursday reported fourth-quarter earnings and revenue that missed Wall Street estimates. Square stock fell on Friday as investors mulled mixed results for key financial metrics and 2025 guidance.
Released after the market close, Square earnings for the period ended Dec. 31 were 71 cents per share on an adjusted basis, up 51% from the year-earlier period.
Also, Square said net revenue came in at $6.032 billion, up 4% from a year earlier, amid slower Cash App growth.
Wall Street analysts had predicted Block earnings of 88 cents a share on revenue of $6.295 billion.
Financial analysts also view gross profit as a key metric for Square stock. In Q4, gross profit rose 14% to $2.31 billion vs. estimates of $2.33 billion.
Cost-cutting boosted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, a key metric known as EBITDA. It came in at $757 million vs. estimates of $740 million.
In Q3, gross payment volume from the transactions of merchant customers rose 10% to $61.95 billion versus estimates of $61.4 billion.
"Slight gross profit miss on softer Cash App growth — offsetting Square upside on a GPV beat. Fiscal 2025 guide for 15%-plus growth reiterated, but will feature a steeper ramp," said Jefferies analyst Trevor Williams in a report.
On the stock market today, Square stock fell 8.8% to 75.70 in early trading.
For 2025, Square said it expects gross profit of $10.22 billion vs. estimates of $10.28 billion.
TD Cowen analyst Bryan Bergin said in a report: "Block delivered the needed acceleration in Square GPV growth, but a modest gross profit miss and below consensus Q1 guide understandably weigh on shares. Fiscal 2025 is to be more back-half weighted than expected and that breeds some consternation."
Block Stock: Technical Ratings Also, Block stock was down about 2% in 2025 heading into the Square earnings report. San Francisco-based Block's earnings included consumer lending firm Afterpay.
In its core businesses, Square operates a two-sided digital payments ecosystem, with products designed for both merchant sellers and consumer buyers.
Block stock holds an IBD Composite Rating of 94 out of a best-possible 99, according to IBD Stock Check-up. IBD's Composite Rating combines five separate proprietary ratings into one easy-to-use rating. The best growth stocks have a Composite Rating of 90 or better.
Square stock, meanwhile, holds an Accumulation/Distribution Rating of C-minus. The rating runs from a best-possible A+ to a worst-possible E. The rating analyzes price and volume changes in a stock over the past 13 weeks of trading.
Further, Block changed its ticker symbol to XYZ from SQ on Jan. 21.
In late 2021, Square changed its name to Block. The move reflected the company's commitment to blockchain technology, which underpins cryptocurrency.
Block trims 2025 outlook as spending slowdown fears mount, shares slump 16% 16:57:53 PM ET, 05/01/2025 - Reuters (Adds outlook in paragraph 4)
May 1 (Reuters) - Block cut its profit forecast for 2025 on Thursday after missing expectations for quarterly earnings as the payments firm grapples with muted consumer spending, sending the company's shares down 16% in extended trading.
President Donald Trump's trade policies have sparked concerns over consumer spending, which makes up more than two-thirds of U.S. economic activity, as well as fears of stagflation.
In a letter to shareholders, the company said it saw "changes to consumer spending" as the quarter progressed and added that the forecast accounts for the volatile macroenvironment.
The company cut its guidance for 2025 gross profit growth to 12% from 15%, while projecting second-quarter gross profit at $2.45 billion, missing Wall Street estimates of $2.54 billion.
The Jack Dorsey-led firm also reported a 60% drop in its first-quarter profit as it recorded a $93.4 million remeasurement loss on its bitcoin investments, compared to a $233.4 million similar gain in the year-ago period.
Block facilitates bitcoin purchases on its platform by acquiring the cryptocurrency through private broker dealers and reselling it at a small premium.
Bitcoin revenue fell 15.7% to $2.30 billion in the quarter ended March 31, as a wider market downturn saw the cryptocurrency decline 12% in the first quarter.
Net income attributable to Block's common stockholders was $189.9 million, or 30 cents per share, for the three months ended March 31, compared with $472 million, or 74 cents per share, a year earlier.
Block's adjusted profit came in at 56 cents per share, well below analysts' expectations of 87 cents, according to data compiled by LSEG.
Its Cash App, which enables peer-to-peer mobile payments, reported gross profit growth of about 10%, down from 25% last year.
The fintech reported transaction-based revenue of $1.55 billion, missing expectations of $1.59 billion.
Founded in 2009 as Square before rebranding in 2021, Block has been deepening its presence in the buy now, pay later market following fierce competition in the digital payments sector from tech giants.
(Reporting by Ateev Bhandari in Bengaluru; Editing by Tasim Zahid and Sriraj Kalluvila)
Our growth in the first half of this year does not meet our bar, and we remain confident in our ability to accelerate Block’s gross profit growth in the second half of 2025 and beyond. Cash App gross profit growth came in below our expectations, largely driven by softer inflows and Cash App Card spend than we had forecasted. We saw changes to consumer spending as the quarter progressed that we believe drove the majority of our forecast miss.
We understand the drivers behind our recent deceleration in growth and have incorporated updated views on the macro environment into our revised guidance for the year. We believe Cash App gross profit growth, and Block gross profit growth overall, will significantly accelerate starting in the third quarter.
We’re currently rolling out a number of new features that we’ve been testing at scale for some time. First, we are rolling out Cash App Borrow (small dollar, short duration loans) to millions more Cash App actives and nearly doubling the number of actives we can serve after receiving FDIC approval to use Square Financial Services to issue consumer loans for Cash App Borrow nationwide. Second, we are evolving Borrow terms which we expect will allow us to increase limits and improve the customer experience. Our machine learning models leverage real-time customer data, which we’ve used to maintain healthy loss rates for Borrow across historical cohorts. Third, we will be increasing Borrow limits for Paycheck Deposit actives as a tool to drive paycheck deposit engagement with our base.
We expect these enhancements to Cash App Borrow will drive gross profit growth through increased originations and improved unit economics. In addition, we believe they will drive benefits to retention, customer engagement, direct deposit attach rates, and inflows. More than half of Borrow loans are used within the Cash App ecosystem. We’ve also seen paycheck deposit actives that receive a Borrow offer are nearly 2.5x more likely to accept it compared to Cash App Card actives and over 13x more likely than non Cash App Card actives.1
While we’ve made progress on banking adoption, we’ve been too narrow in our focus.2 We want to expand the underlying Cash App network to drive actives growth and density. We’re now addressing 3 key areas:
1) Network density: We’ve prioritized web-based signup, new P2P features, and improving our referrals/invites and funnel. We’re also re-prioritizing a more concerted effort to attract and engage teens and families, a group we believe is massively underserved and one we’re well-positioned to support. With Cash App’s product depth, scale, and cultural relevance, we’re in a strong position to serve teens needs in a safe and trusted way.
2) Optimizing product controls: We’ve done a lot of work to make Cash App healthier and more resilient. However, we’ve observed that some of the controls we implemented unintentionally disrupted good customers. We’re refining our approach and increasingly focused on ensuring customers can rely on Cash App to run their financial lives, without compromising our ability to prevent and remove unwanted activity from the platform. These changes will contribute positively to growth going forward.
3) Increasing high-ROI marketing spend: After resetting marketing measurement last year, we’re continuing to increase our investment across channels. We’re increasing marketing spend nearly 50% in Q2 compared to Q1 to drive actives growth and engagement while maintaining strong ROI thresholds. We’re scaling our national Banking campaign in Q2 and we’re launching a new campaign focused on commerce and Cash App Afterpay.
Our updated 2025 outlook is not dependent on these 3 initiatives, but we believe there’s something meaningful here.
Square has shipped products and features faster and we’ve increased our go-to-market investments across sales, partnerships, and marketing. In Q4 we saw initial signs that this was driving progress. After Q1 we’re increasingly confident these investments are paying off. In the first quarter, we gained market share in our core verticals and we exceeded volume targets across our sales and partnerships channels. This gives us the confidence to continue ramping our go-to-market investments.
More large sellers are seeing Square as a partner to help them grow their business, and we’re going to keep delivering products that give our sellers time back through automation and AI. We grew GPV 8.2% year over year on a constant currency basis in Q1 and believe we will only improve growth from here.
We will be hosting our first ever seasonal release event for Square on May 13th where we will share over 100 product and feature launches with new and existing sellers. We expect these events to be a key part of our product release cadence going forward. This is a key part of the overall go-to-market motion changes we’ve been executing against as we focus on re-accelerating customer acquisition and deepening engagement across our product suite with existing sellers.
Finally, we’re shifting the entire company to build and use agentic systems. We helped lead the industry here with codename:goose and MCP, which many of our peers have taken an interest in and expanded. Our initial focus was to improve engineering productivity, which it has by ~30% already. We’re now expanding the use of these agentic systems to every role in the company.
Our first goal is to make goose our single interface for all of our functions to enable us to ship faster and be more efficient, and effectively automate the entire company in a way that wasn't possible before. Our second goal is to weave goose into our consumer and seller interfaces so that our customers have a personal CFO and COO respectively to help automate nearly all of their financial and operational workflows. We are creating an intuitive natural language interface (typed or spoken) that can prompt our customers proactively given our deep understanding of them based on 16 years of experience. We’ll achieve both of these goals by the end of this year.
Taken together, we anticipate Block topline growth to accelerate from a low point in the first half to the mid-teens in Q4. Improvements in Cash App gross profit will be the primary driver of the overall acceleration in Block topline but we also expect to see faster growth in Square and the first gross profit contributions from Proto, as we deliver our first chips and systems in the second half of the year. Removing macro volatility, we believe we’re now focused on all the right drivers to call this the bottom, and we’ll be able to achieve acceleration of everything going forward.
RBC Cuts Price Target on Block to $63 From $86, Keeps Outperform Rating President Capital Downgrades Block to Neutral From Buy, Adjusts Price Target to $61 From $73 BMO Downgrades Block to Market Perform From Outperform, $58 Price Target Morgan Stanley Trims Price Target on Block to $65 From $67, Keeps Overweight Rating
Shares of Block Inc. XYZ jumped over 8.5% in extended trading on July 18, 2025, following news that the fintech company will join the S&P 500 index, replacing Hess. The addition becomes effective before the opening bell on July 23, according to a statement from S&P Dow Jones Indices.
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