Twitter and Airbnb Stock Swoon. Why Major Internet Stocks Are Falling Today.

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Investors in the internet sector are abuzz Monday after a Goldman Sachs analyst picked up coverage of the group, offering new ratings on 17 of the largest stocks. His calls made waves with the stocks to start the week.

Analyst Eric Sheridan’s views on the stocks shouldn’t come as a total surprise to institutional investors; He joined Goldman in July after a nearly nine-year run as an analyst on the group at UBS. Sheridan is generally bullish on the sector, seeing opportunities for investors to “capture a mixture” of growth, increasing free cash flow, and capital return to shareholders.

“In our view, the industry still has ample opportunities for secular revenue growth and increased operating efficiencies on the back of building scale in the coming years,” he wrote in the 226-page report. “That being said, we are not uniformly bullish given the fact that many companies either have forward growth more than priced into their equity at current levels.”

Sheridan set Buy ratings on

Amazon.

com (ticker: AMZN),

Facebook

(FB),

Alphabet

(GOOGL),

Snap

(SNAP),

Uber Technologies

(UBER),

Lyft

(LYFT), and

Expedia

(EXPE).

“Our Buy ratings are reflective of companies where the market is still under-appreciating the prospects for long-term compounded growth and/or longer-term operating margin structures as reflected in current valuation,” Sheridan said. “In addition, our operating estimates broadly sit above consensus estimates for these companies over the next 12-24 months.”

He put Neutral ratings on

Pinterest

(PINS),

Chewy

(CHWY),

Netflix

(NFLX),

Spotify Technology

(SPOT),

Peloton Interactive

(PTON),

Booking Holdings

(BKNG), and

DoorDash

(DASH).

He gave Sell ratings on both

Airbnb

(ABNB) and

Twitter

(TWTR).

All nine of the stocks Sheridan started with Neutral or Sell ratings were losing ground Monday, with the largest losses hitting Twitter and Airbnb. Both Chewy and Spotify were down more than 2%.

On Twitter, Sheridan set a target price of $60, about 8% below recent levels. He noted that his five-year financial forecasts on the company are “broadly below current consensus estimates.” He thinks the company will fall short of Twitter’s own user and revenue goals laid out at its February 2021 analyst day.

On Airbnb, Sheridan’s price target is $132, which implies about a 20% drop from recent levels. Sheridan said the company is “a strong player with runway for growth and margin expansion,” but he also expects “a volatile travel environment ahead,” finds the online travel market to be “relatively mature,” and sees “high levels of competitive intensity.” He added that his forward estimates are well below Street estimates.

As part of the note, Sheridan laid out a list of 10 themes he sees for the internet group: blurring lines between e-commerce and advertising; the rise of the creator economy; streaming media reaching global scale, but with content cost questions; the shift of local commerce online; the growth of subscription-based services, but with potential consumer fatigue; the growth of cloud computing; the emergence of augmented reality and the metaverse; more personalized online travel services; growing costs from regulation; and the rise of the decentralized web.

Write to Eric J. Savitz at [email protected]