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PayPal's Recent Price Decline Will Eventually Happen To Nearly All Overvalued Technology Stocks

Summary PayPal stock is down over -35% off this year's highs, and the stock still isn't cheap. I wa

PayPal's Recent Price Decline Will Eventually Happen To Nearly All Overvalued Technology Stocks

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{"i18n":{"language":"zh_CN"},"data":{"magic":2,"id":607088217,"tweetId":"607088217","gmtCreate":1639457942790,"gmtModify":1639458111522,"author":{"id":3581326346667529,"idStr":"3581326346667529","authorId":3581326346667529,"authorIdStr":"3581326346667529","name":"1000010101O","avatar":"https://static.laohu8.com/default-avatar.jpg","vip":1,"userType":1,"introduction":"","boolIsFan":false,"boolIsHead":false,"crmLevel":4,"crmLevelSwitch":0,"individualDisplayBadges":[],"fanSize":9,"starInvestorFlag":false},"themes":[],"images":[],"coverImages":[],"extraTitle":"","html":"<html><head></head><body>[Smile]&nbsp; </body></html>","htmlText":"<html><head></head><body>[Smile]&nbsp; </body></html>","text":"[Smile]","highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":4,"commentSize":0,"repostSize":0,"favoriteSize":0,"link":"https://laohu8.com/post/607088217","repostId":1120286910,"repostType":4,"repost":{"id":"1120286910","pubTimestamp":1639453388,"share":"https://www.laohu8.com/m/news/1120286910?lang=&edition=full","pubTime":"2021-12-14 11:43","market":"us","language":"en","title":"PayPal's Recent Price Decline Will Eventually Happen To Nearly All Overvalued Technology Stocks","url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=1120286910","media":"Seeking Alpha","summary":"Summary\n\nPayPal stock is down over -35% off this year's highs, and the stock still isn't cheap.\nI wa","content":"Summary\n<ul>\n <li>PayPal stock is down over -35% off this year's highs, and the stock still isn't cheap.</li>\n <li>I warned investors back in February of 2021 that PayPal was extremely overvalued and worth selling.</li>\n <li>That warning could have been issued for dozens and dozens of overvalued technology stocks that still have over -50% downside from here within the next 3 years.</li>\n <li>PayPal remains a great company that I would like to own, so I analyze the stock in order to establish I price at which I'd be willing to buy it.</li>\n</ul>\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/847095b0be294275f55f7e8f700d56b4\" tg-width=\"1536\" tg-height=\"1229\" width=\"100%\" height=\"auto\">BsWei/iStock via Getty Images\nIntroduction\nBack on February 6th, 2021, I made a video where I shared with investors why PayPal (PYPL) stock was overvalued enough to sell. I shared that video on my Seeking Alpha bloghere. Since that time, PayPal has performed poorly both on an absolute basis and relative to the S&amp;P 500 (SPY).\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/8252b7218af36cce8b5a591f56abaecd\" tg-width=\"635\" tg-height=\"433\" width=\"100%\" height=\"auto\">Data by YCharts\nThe stock price is down about -30% since I warned investors and down about -38% off its high price of the year.\nThe truth is that I could have issued the same warning about many other technology stocks that had become overvalued, but PayPal was one that I actually wanted to buy if the price ever fell to a reasonable level. It was a case where there was absolutely nothing wrong with the company. There was no bad story to tell. The price had simply gotten insanely overvalued. It didn't matter how good the story around PayPal was back in February. Numbers almost always trump narrative over the long-term. And the numbers back then didn't make sense.\nThis should be an important lesson for medium and long-term investors. If the numbers don't work, it doesn't matter what the story is.\nThe difficultly for a stock writer like myself is that investorslovenarratives and stories. It's not our fault. Our human brains are hardwired that way. Since I shared my bearish February PayPal video, out of 62 articles on Seeking Alpha covering PayPal, there hasn't been a single \"Bearish\" article written. The primary reason for that is because PayPal's narrative was so appealing that valuation numbers were either ignored, or the assumptions around the numbers were not realistic.\nIn this article, I'm going to share my current PayPal valuation based on earnings and earnings growth projections. I'll also share what I consider to be a fair value range for PayPal stock, and the price I would be looking to buy with a margin of safety. This is the same basic process I used to determine that PayPal stock was overvalued back in February of 2021.\nFull-Cycle Earnings Analysis\nAs part of the analysis, I calculate what I consider to be the two main drivers of future total returns: Market sentiment returns and business returns. I then combine those expected returns together in the form of a 10-year CAGR expectation and use that to value the stock.\nBefore I begin this analysis, I always check the business's long-term earnings patterns in order to ensure that the business is a proper fit for this sort of analysis. If the historical earnings 1) don't have a long enough history 2) are erratic in nature, or 3) are too cyclical, then I either avoid analyzing the stock altogether or I use a different type of analysis that is more appropriate.\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/70078307e65a5a1d0e37f9e70b726b77\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"490\" width=\"100%\" height=\"auto\">\nWe can see that since 2015 PayPal's earnings per share have increased every single year. This is a clear secular growth pattern and it makes the stock very attractive as a long-term investment. Since 2015 there haven't been any negative earnings growth years so the stock is likely a good fit for the type of earnings analysis I'm going to perform. One important question to ask, though, is that while we did have a brief recession in 2020, it was a very unusual one. It's possible that PayPal's business could be more economically sensitive during a longer, more drawn-out recession. So, that is a risk. However, when I examined how eBay (EBAY) performed in the 2008/9 recession, its earnings growth was basically flat, and never went negative. If I had to make a guess, I think PayPal's earnings growth rate would probably decline during a \"normal\" recession, but still wouldn't be especially cyclical. For those reasons, I'm going to go ahead with my Full-Cycle Earnings Analysis even though we don't have hard historical data from \"normal\" recession for PayPal.\nMarket Sentiment Return Expectations\nIn order to estimate what sort of returns we might expect over the next 10 years, let's begin by examining what return we could expect 10 years from now if the P/E multiple were to revert to its mean from the previous economic cycle. Since we have had a recent recession (albeit an unusual one) I'm starting this cycle in fiscal year 2015 and running it through 2021's estimates.\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/e36d2c3455962a02d96b8c88c32eadce\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"490\" width=\"100%\" height=\"auto\">\nPayPal's average P/E from 2015 to the present has been a healthy 34.11 (the blue bar circled in gold on the FAST Graph). Using 2021's forward earnings estimates of $4.60 (also circled in gold), PayPal has a current P/E of 40.73. If that 40.73 P/E were to revert to the average P/E of 34.11 over the course of the next 10 years and everything else was held the same, PayPal's price would fall and it would produce a 10-Year CAGR of-1.75%. That's the annual return we can expect from sentiment mean reversion if it takes ten years to revert. If it takes less time to revert, the price could fall faster.\nBusiness Earnings Expectations\nWe previously examined what would happen if market sentiment reverted to the mean. This is entirely determined by the mood of the market and is quite often disconnected, or only loosely connected, to the performance of the actual business. In this section, we will examine the actual earnings of the business. The goal here is simple: We want to know how much money we would earn (expressed in the form of a CAGR %) over the course of 10 years if we bought the business at today's prices and kept all of the earnings for ourselves.\nThere are two main components of this: the first is the earnings yield and the second is the rate at which the earnings can be expected to grow. Let's start with the earnings yield (which is an inverted P/E ratio, so, the Earnings/Price ratio). The current earnings yield is about +2.46%. The way I like to think about this is, if I bought the company's whole business right now for $100, I would earn $2.46 per year on my investment if earnings remained the same for the next 10 years.\nThe next step is to estimate the company's earnings growth during this time period. I do that by figuring out at what rate earnings grew during the last cycle and applying that rate to the next 10 years. This involves calculating the EPS growth rate since 2015, taking into account each year's EPS growth or decline, and then backing out any share buybacks that occurred over that time period (because reducing shares will increase the EPS due to fewer shares).\n<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/f31b7d8ed5f59c82c2531cc686324d1a\" tg-width=\"635\" tg-height=\"417\" width=\"100%\" height=\"auto\">Data by YCharts\nDue to the scale of the graph, the buybacks look much bigger than they actually are, and there isn't much to adjust here. Additionally, since PayPal has grown earnings every year there are no earnings growth declines to adjust for either. This makes estimating PayPal's earnings growth a relatively straightforward affair, and I estimate PayPal's earnings growth at about +23.65%.\nNow, this is the point where my conservatism when it comes to asking myself \"What is a reasonable expectation, for valuation purposes, going forward 10 years?\" It is very, very difficult for businesses to grow earnings over 20% per year for a full decade (particularly if they have already been doing that the previous decade). For that reason, I cap all of my long-term forward earnings growth estimates when using them for valuation purposes at 20%. This is simply a way to help keep me from overpaying for a stock when their P/E multiple is likely to contract over time. So, for this valuation exercise, I am limiting my earnings growth assumption to 20%.\nNext, I'll apply that growth rate to current earnings, looking forward 10 years in order to get a final 10-year CAGR estimate. The way I think about this is, if I bought PayPal's whole business for $100, it would pay me back $2.46 plus +20.00% growth the first year, and that amount would grow at +20.00% per year for 10 years after that. I want to know how much money I would have in total at the end of 10 years on my $100 investment, which I calculate to be about $176.50 (including the original $100). When I plug that growth into a CAGR calculator, that translates to a+5.85%10-year CAGR estimate for the expected business earnings returns.\n10-Year, Full-Cycle CAGR Estimate\nPotential future returns can come from two main places: market sentiment returns or business earnings returns. If we assume that market sentiment reverts to the mean from the last cycle over the next 10 years for PayPal, it will produce a -1.75% CAGR. If the earnings yield and growth are similar to the last cycle, the company should produce somewhere around a +5.85% 10-year CAGR. If we put the two together, we get an expected 10-year, full-cycle CAGR of+4.10%at today's price.\nMy Buy/Sell/Hold range for this category of stocks is: above a 12% CAGR is a Buy, below a 4% expected CAGR is a Sell, and in between 4% and 12% is a Hold. This puts PayPal stock just barely into the \"Hold\" category at today's price level.\nAdditional Considerations\nI consider PayPal one of the highest quality growth stocks in the market right now, which is why I've been monitoring its valuation relatively closely. In this section I'm going to share my fair value range for PayPal along with the price I would be willing to buy the stock with a margin of safety based on earnings, and also the price I would consider buying using a more aggressive and less conservative valuation approach. So, I'm going to look at PayPal's valuation from a variety of different perspectives to give us a clearer view of what might be an appropriate price to pay for the stock.\nFirst, I'll start with my buy price and fair value range using the same assumptions and inputs I used in this article. If we use all of those same inputs my current fair value range for PayPal is about $126.50 to $164.00 per share. My current buy price that includes a margin of safety is $112.10. Investors who buy below that price have very good odds of great returns over the medium-term with the stock.\nOnce we get into the new year and 2022, I'll start pulling forward PayPal's 2022 earnings for my estimates. Right now, analysts expect $5.25 per share from earnings in 2022. That will improve PayPal's valuation a lot if the rest of their metrics remain the same, and it would raise their fair value range up to $145.00 to $187.50 dollars per share with a margin of safety buy price at $128.00 per share. This, of course, assumes analysts keep their estimates for 2022 in place and don't lower them over the next couple of months. It also means, based on future earnings, that in a month or two if PayPal keeps trading near its current price, it is already in the top end of a \"fair value\" price range. This might be a further reason for current owners to keep holding.\nThe Full-Cycle Earnings analysis I used in this article is not the only type of analysis I use. For certain rare businesses with fast profit growth dynamics, I recently developed a new analysis to help identify fast-growing businesses that might never become cheap enough to buy based on earnings alone. The methods of this analysis are exclusive to my private service, The Cyclical Investor's Club, but since PayPal's profit growth is very strong, it actually qualifies for this type of analysis, too, and I thought I would at least share the sort of \"buy price\" that analysis produces because it's a little more aggressive than the earnings-based analysis.\nWhen I examine PayPal using the profit growth analysis, it produces a buy price of $144.90. I find that interesting because if profits keep growing this quarter that price is likely to rise a little bit and put it pretty close to the middle of fair value using next year's earnings using my earnings-based method. This assumes that PayPal's metrics don't deteriorate between now and then, and there would be some technical requirements PayPal would have to meet as well, but I think the odds are good that by February of 2022 I could be a buyer of PayPal stock, approximately one year after I warned investors about its high valuation. It's going to be very interesting to see how it turns out.\nConclusion\nI think PayPal's 2021 decline is an interesting and useful case study that goes beyond PayPal itself. The sort of decline we've seen in PayPal's stock price this year was entirely predictable and there are many other richly valued technology stocks that will experience a similar decline, likely in 2022 for most of them. For investors who are overweight these types of stocks, now is probably a time to consider diversifying in order to help keep the gains they have experienced the past couple of years. While there will be some overvalued stocks that simply stagnate for several years and go nowhere, and a rare few that manage to keep rising, the vast majority will experience declines like PayPal has experienced.","collect":0,"html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>PayPal's Recent Price Decline Will Eventually Happen To Nearly All Overvalued Technology Stocks</title>\n<style type=\"text/css\">\na,abbr,acronym,address,applet,article,aside,audio,b,big,blockquote,body,canvas,caption,center,cite,code,dd,del,details,dfn,div,dl,dt,\nem,embed,fieldset,figcaption,figure,footer,form,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,header,hgroup,html,i,iframe,img,ins,kbd,label,legend,li,mark,menu,nav,\nobject,ol,output,p,pre,q,ruby,s,samp,section,small,span,strike,strong,sub,summary,sup,table,tbody,td,tfoot,th,thead,time,tr,tt,u,ul,var,video{ font:inherit;margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;border:0 }\nbody{ font-size:16px; line-height:1.5; color:#999; background:transparent; }\n.wrapper{ overflow:hidden;word-break:break-all;padding:10px; }\nh1,h2{ font-weight:normal; line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:.6em; }\nh3,h4,h5,h6{ line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:1em; }\nh1{ font-size:24px; }\nh2{ font-size:20px; }\nh3{ font-size:18px; }\nh4{ font-size:16px; }\nh5{ font-size:14px; }\nh6{ font-size:12px; }\np,ul,ol,blockquote,dl,table{ margin:1.2em 0; }\nul,ol{ margin-left:2em; }\nul{ list-style:disc; }\nol{ list-style:decimal; }\nli,li p{ margin:10px 0;}\nimg{ max-width:100%;display:block;margin:0 auto 1em; }\nblockquote{ color:#B5B2B1; border-left:3px solid #aaa; padding:1em; }\nstrong,b{font-weight:bold;}\nem,i{font-style:italic;}\ntable{ width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:1px;margin:1em 0;font-size:.9em; }\nth,td{ padding:5px;text-align:left;border:1px solid #aaa; }\nth{ font-weight:bold;background:#5d5d5d; }\n.symbol-link{font-weight:bold;}\n/* header{ border-bottom:1px solid #494756; } */\n.title{ margin:0 0 8px;line-height:1.3;color:#ddd; }\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 11px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;line-height: 11px;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nPayPal's Recent Price Decline Will Eventually Happen To Nearly All Overvalued Technology Stocks\n</h2>\n\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n\n\n2021-12-14 11:43 GMT+8&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href=https://seekingalpha.com/article/4474960-paypal-share-price-decline-overvalued-technology-stocks>Seeking Alpha</a>\n\n\n</h4>\n\n</header>\n<article>\n<div>\nSummary\n\nPayPal stock is down over -35% off this year's highs, and the stock still isn't cheap.\nI warned investors back in February of 2021 that PayPal was extremely overvalued and worth selling.\nThat...\n\n<a href=\"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4474960-paypal-share-price-decline-overvalued-technology-stocks\">Web Link</a>\n\n</div>\n\n\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","type":0,"thumbnail":"","relate_stocks":{},"source_url":"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4474960-paypal-share-price-decline-overvalued-technology-stocks","is_english":true,"share_image_url":"https://static.laohu8.com/e9f99090a1c2ed51c021029395664489","article_id":"1120286910","content_text":"Summary\n\nPayPal stock is down over -35% off this year's highs, and the stock still isn't cheap.\nI warned investors back in February of 2021 that PayPal was extremely overvalued and worth selling.\nThat warning could have been issued for dozens and dozens of overvalued technology stocks that still have over -50% downside from here within the next 3 years.\nPayPal remains a great company that I would like to own, so I analyze the stock in order to establish I price at which I'd be willing to buy it.\n\nBsWei/iStock via Getty Images\nIntroduction\nBack on February 6th, 2021, I made a video where I shared with investors why PayPal (PYPL) stock was overvalued enough to sell. I shared that video on my Seeking Alpha bloghere. Since that time, PayPal has performed poorly both on an absolute basis and relative to the S&P 500 (SPY).\nData by YCharts\nThe stock price is down about -30% since I warned investors and down about -38% off its high price of the year.\nThe truth is that I could have issued the same warning about many other technology stocks that had become overvalued, but PayPal was one that I actually wanted to buy if the price ever fell to a reasonable level. It was a case where there was absolutely nothing wrong with the company. There was no bad story to tell. The price had simply gotten insanely overvalued. It didn't matter how good the story around PayPal was back in February. Numbers almost always trump narrative over the long-term. And the numbers back then didn't make sense.\nThis should be an important lesson for medium and long-term investors. If the numbers don't work, it doesn't matter what the story is.\nThe difficultly for a stock writer like myself is that investorslovenarratives and stories. It's not our fault. Our human brains are hardwired that way. Since I shared my bearish February PayPal video, out of 62 articles on Seeking Alpha covering PayPal, there hasn't been a single \"Bearish\" article written. The primary reason for that is because PayPal's narrative was so appealing that valuation numbers were either ignored, or the assumptions around the numbers were not realistic.\nIn this article, I'm going to share my current PayPal valuation based on earnings and earnings growth projections. I'll also share what I consider to be a fair value range for PayPal stock, and the price I would be looking to buy with a margin of safety. This is the same basic process I used to determine that PayPal stock was overvalued back in February of 2021.\nFull-Cycle Earnings Analysis\nAs part of the analysis, I calculate what I consider to be the two main drivers of future total returns: Market sentiment returns and business returns. I then combine those expected returns together in the form of a 10-year CAGR expectation and use that to value the stock.\nBefore I begin this analysis, I always check the business's long-term earnings patterns in order to ensure that the business is a proper fit for this sort of analysis. If the historical earnings 1) don't have a long enough history 2) are erratic in nature, or 3) are too cyclical, then I either avoid analyzing the stock altogether or I use a different type of analysis that is more appropriate.\n\nWe can see that since 2015 PayPal's earnings per share have increased every single year. This is a clear secular growth pattern and it makes the stock very attractive as a long-term investment. Since 2015 there haven't been any negative earnings growth years so the stock is likely a good fit for the type of earnings analysis I'm going to perform. One important question to ask, though, is that while we did have a brief recession in 2020, it was a very unusual one. It's possible that PayPal's business could be more economically sensitive during a longer, more drawn-out recession. So, that is a risk. However, when I examined how eBay (EBAY) performed in the 2008/9 recession, its earnings growth was basically flat, and never went negative. If I had to make a guess, I think PayPal's earnings growth rate would probably decline during a \"normal\" recession, but still wouldn't be especially cyclical. For those reasons, I'm going to go ahead with my Full-Cycle Earnings Analysis even though we don't have hard historical data from \"normal\" recession for PayPal.\nMarket Sentiment Return Expectations\nIn order to estimate what sort of returns we might expect over the next 10 years, let's begin by examining what return we could expect 10 years from now if the P/E multiple were to revert to its mean from the previous economic cycle. Since we have had a recent recession (albeit an unusual one) I'm starting this cycle in fiscal year 2015 and running it through 2021's estimates.\n\nPayPal's average P/E from 2015 to the present has been a healthy 34.11 (the blue bar circled in gold on the FAST Graph). Using 2021's forward earnings estimates of $4.60 (also circled in gold), PayPal has a current P/E of 40.73. If that 40.73 P/E were to revert to the average P/E of 34.11 over the course of the next 10 years and everything else was held the same, PayPal's price would fall and it would produce a 10-Year CAGR of-1.75%. That's the annual return we can expect from sentiment mean reversion if it takes ten years to revert. If it takes less time to revert, the price could fall faster.\nBusiness Earnings Expectations\nWe previously examined what would happen if market sentiment reverted to the mean. This is entirely determined by the mood of the market and is quite often disconnected, or only loosely connected, to the performance of the actual business. In this section, we will examine the actual earnings of the business. The goal here is simple: We want to know how much money we would earn (expressed in the form of a CAGR %) over the course of 10 years if we bought the business at today's prices and kept all of the earnings for ourselves.\nThere are two main components of this: the first is the earnings yield and the second is the rate at which the earnings can be expected to grow. Let's start with the earnings yield (which is an inverted P/E ratio, so, the Earnings/Price ratio). The current earnings yield is about +2.46%. The way I like to think about this is, if I bought the company's whole business right now for $100, I would earn $2.46 per year on my investment if earnings remained the same for the next 10 years.\nThe next step is to estimate the company's earnings growth during this time period. I do that by figuring out at what rate earnings grew during the last cycle and applying that rate to the next 10 years. This involves calculating the EPS growth rate since 2015, taking into account each year's EPS growth or decline, and then backing out any share buybacks that occurred over that time period (because reducing shares will increase the EPS due to fewer shares).\nData by YCharts\nDue to the scale of the graph, the buybacks look much bigger than they actually are, and there isn't much to adjust here. Additionally, since PayPal has grown earnings every year there are no earnings growth declines to adjust for either. This makes estimating PayPal's earnings growth a relatively straightforward affair, and I estimate PayPal's earnings growth at about +23.65%.\nNow, this is the point where my conservatism when it comes to asking myself \"What is a reasonable expectation, for valuation purposes, going forward 10 years?\" It is very, very difficult for businesses to grow earnings over 20% per year for a full decade (particularly if they have already been doing that the previous decade). For that reason, I cap all of my long-term forward earnings growth estimates when using them for valuation purposes at 20%. This is simply a way to help keep me from overpaying for a stock when their P/E multiple is likely to contract over time. So, for this valuation exercise, I am limiting my earnings growth assumption to 20%.\nNext, I'll apply that growth rate to current earnings, looking forward 10 years in order to get a final 10-year CAGR estimate. The way I think about this is, if I bought PayPal's whole business for $100, it would pay me back $2.46 plus +20.00% growth the first year, and that amount would grow at +20.00% per year for 10 years after that. I want to know how much money I would have in total at the end of 10 years on my $100 investment, which I calculate to be about $176.50 (including the original $100). When I plug that growth into a CAGR calculator, that translates to a+5.85%10-year CAGR estimate for the expected business earnings returns.\n10-Year, Full-Cycle CAGR Estimate\nPotential future returns can come from two main places: market sentiment returns or business earnings returns. If we assume that market sentiment reverts to the mean from the last cycle over the next 10 years for PayPal, it will produce a -1.75% CAGR. If the earnings yield and growth are similar to the last cycle, the company should produce somewhere around a +5.85% 10-year CAGR. If we put the two together, we get an expected 10-year, full-cycle CAGR of+4.10%at today's price.\nMy Buy/Sell/Hold range for this category of stocks is: above a 12% CAGR is a Buy, below a 4% expected CAGR is a Sell, and in between 4% and 12% is a Hold. This puts PayPal stock just barely into the \"Hold\" category at today's price level.\nAdditional Considerations\nI consider PayPal one of the highest quality growth stocks in the market right now, which is why I've been monitoring its valuation relatively closely. In this section I'm going to share my fair value range for PayPal along with the price I would be willing to buy the stock with a margin of safety based on earnings, and also the price I would consider buying using a more aggressive and less conservative valuation approach. So, I'm going to look at PayPal's valuation from a variety of different perspectives to give us a clearer view of what might be an appropriate price to pay for the stock.\nFirst, I'll start with my buy price and fair value range using the same assumptions and inputs I used in this article. If we use all of those same inputs my current fair value range for PayPal is about $126.50 to $164.00 per share. My current buy price that includes a margin of safety is $112.10. Investors who buy below that price have very good odds of great returns over the medium-term with the stock.\nOnce we get into the new year and 2022, I'll start pulling forward PayPal's 2022 earnings for my estimates. Right now, analysts expect $5.25 per share from earnings in 2022. That will improve PayPal's valuation a lot if the rest of their metrics remain the same, and it would raise their fair value range up to $145.00 to $187.50 dollars per share with a margin of safety buy price at $128.00 per share. This, of course, assumes analysts keep their estimates for 2022 in place and don't lower them over the next couple of months. It also means, based on future earnings, that in a month or two if PayPal keeps trading near its current price, it is already in the top end of a \"fair value\" price range. This might be a further reason for current owners to keep holding.\nThe Full-Cycle Earnings analysis I used in this article is not the only type of analysis I use. For certain rare businesses with fast profit growth dynamics, I recently developed a new analysis to help identify fast-growing businesses that might never become cheap enough to buy based on earnings alone. The methods of this analysis are exclusive to my private service, The Cyclical Investor's Club, but since PayPal's profit growth is very strong, it actually qualifies for this type of analysis, too, and I thought I would at least share the sort of \"buy price\" that analysis produces because it's a little more aggressive than the earnings-based analysis.\nWhen I examine PayPal using the profit growth analysis, it produces a buy price of $144.90. I find that interesting because if profits keep growing this quarter that price is likely to rise a little bit and put it pretty close to the middle of fair value using next year's earnings using my earnings-based method. This assumes that PayPal's metrics don't deteriorate between now and then, and there would be some technical requirements PayPal would have to meet as well, but I think the odds are good that by February of 2022 I could be a buyer of PayPal stock, approximately one year after I warned investors about its high valuation. It's going to be very interesting to see how it turns out.\nConclusion\nI think PayPal's 2021 decline is an interesting and useful case study that goes beyond PayPal itself. The sort of decline we've seen in PayPal's stock price this year was entirely predictable and there are many other richly valued technology stocks that will experience a similar decline, likely in 2022 for most of them. For investors who are overweight these types of stocks, now is probably a time to consider diversifying in order to help keep the gains they have experienced the past couple of years. While there will be some overvalued stocks that simply stagnate for several years and go nowhere, and a rare few that manage to keep rising, the vast majority will experience declines like PayPal has experienced.","news_type":1},"isVote":1,"tweetType":1,"viewCount":735,"commentLimit":10,"likeStatus":false,"favoriteStatus":false,"reportStatus":false,"symbols":[],"verified":2,"subType":0,"readableState":1,"langContent":"CN","currentLanguage":"CN","warmUpFlag":false,"orderFlag":false,"shareable":true,"causeOfNotShareable":"","featuresForAnalytics":[],"commentAndTweetFlag":false,"andRepostAutoSelectedFlag":false,"upFlag":false,"length":7,"xxTargetLangEnum":"ZH_CN"},"commentList":[],"hasMoreComment":false,"orderType":2}