FanDuel has lowered its guidance four times in a row. Four. That's not a turnaround. That's a car rolling backward down a hill while the driver insists he's just taking the scenic route.
Rothschild & Co. looked at this pattern and concluded maybe don't buy the stock right now. Groundbreaking stuff. Really earning that advisory fee. Next they'll tell us that companies who miss estimates every quarter might continue missing estimates.
The phrase "taking time" is doing heroic work in that headline. A turnaround taking time means the company needs a few quarters to right the ship. Four consecutive guidance cuts means the ship is actively sinking and someone keeps drilling new holes to let the water out faster.
Retail traders read "think twice" as a challenge. They think once about buying. They think twice about buying more. Mission accomplished. Rothschild might as well have titled the report "Please Don't, But We Know You Will Anyway."
FanDuel's owner is Flutter Entertainment, which sounds like a social media app your aunt uses to share minion memes. The stock is down because sports betting turned out to be exactly as profitable as everyone with a functioning brain predicted: a race to give away free money until someone runs out of free money to give away.
But sure, maybe the fifth guidance will be the charm. Maybe FanDuel just needed to lower expectations four times to really nail the target. That's how accuracy works. You miss badly, then miss worse, then miss even worse, then miss so catastrophically that the fifth time you're basically a marksman.
Rothschild is "less enthusiastic" about the stock. That's Wall Street for "we're out" translated through six layers of politeness so nobody sues. Imagine being so bad at your job that a company named after generational wealth tells people to keep their distance.
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