What happened
You can't keep a good stock down, a dynamic that seemed to prop up the value of Roku (ROKU -0.57%) stock on Monday. In late afternoon trading the company was treading water with a 0.6% share price gain, in contrast to the slump of the S&P 500 index. This, despite a recommendation downgrade from an analyst tracking the shares.
So what
The man doing the downgrading was Pivotal Research's Jeffrey Wlodarczak, who changed his recommendation on Roku stock from hold to sell, at a $60 per-share price target. The analyst described both the company's recently reported second-quarter earnings and guidance for its current third quarter as "awful."
Wlodarczak is also concerned that Roku is opening its wallet at a time when many consumers will be closing theirs.
"Management ramped expenses dramatically into what we believe will be a '23 recession which is likely to lead to lower than consensus revenue growth and larger losses through '23 and possibly '24 depending on the length of what we view as an inevitable recession," he wrote in a new research note.
Now what
It's easy to be down on Roku in the wake of those second-quarter results; many would agree with Wlodarczak's assessment.
But it seems that investors were generally taking a brighter view of the company Monday, perhaps bearing in mind its many strengths.
Its stock remains one of the best plays in streaming video, not so much for the set-top devices it makes but for its operating system now native to many TVs currently on the market. This positions it well as a provider-agnostic platform operator, a position that should be increasingly beneficial despite the short-term hiccups the company is currently enduring.
