Rideshare is Healing 🙏

A day after Zillow disclosed that it was looking to sell a backlog of over 7,000 homes (worth over $2.8 billion), the company is announcing an end to its homebuying unit. 🙅

In the summer, the company ramped up Zillow Offers, a service which buys homes from people using an algorithm. Alas, Zillow’s home-buying AI, iBuyer, was unable to “accurately price homes.” The inaccurate prices, along with other costs incurred from buying and flipping the home, squashed the margins. 📉

So what happens now? Well, iBuyer will be dragged to the Recycle Bin (rest assured that the Zestimate on your house isn’t worth sh*t, either.) More importantly, the company will lay off over 2,000 employees. In other words, Zillow Offers is getting scorched 🔥 (and leaving a quarter of its staff with pink slips. 😬)

Most of Zillow’s remaining backlog will probably end up in the hands of institutional owners, sold at a loss of nearly $550 million. This means Zillow will no longer be your neighbor, so you’ll have to settle for mega-banks and foreign governments instead. 😅 🏠

If you’re looking for the finer details on Zillow’s latest quarter, you can read up here. A work of caution to $Z holders: they missed biggggg time.

$Z traded down over 19% today.

Avis Budget Group is the latest car company to get its very own speculative run. 🏃‍♀️ 🏃‍♀️ Shares of $CAR traded up over 200% intraday. The company can thank its beefy earnings, but the real action came after executives had something to share about EVs in their earnings call.

Avis Budget reported net income of $674 million ($10.45/per share in EPS) on its $3.0 billion in revenue. Unsurprisingly, this almost doubled YoY (most people didn’t have anywhere to be in 2020 anyway.) 

These figures were starkly above analysts’ best guesses for the rental company — the company beat revenue by 8% and EPS by 60.9%. That’s one way to kill the shorts … and oh, were there many. 🐻 According to Ortex, the estimated short interest was 28.8% of float. In other words, roughly three out of ten shares were reported to be sold short.

If earnings and short interest were gasoline, then comments during the company’s earnings call about EV purchases were the lighter that set this speculative frenzy ablaze. 🔥 🔥 The company’s executives made vague comments, insinuating that Avis would increase EV purchases. Chief Executive Office Joseph Ferraro suggested that Avis Budget would play a “big role” in bringing EVs to the masses.

But how big will that big role be? We’ll have to see … but they’ll be competing with Hertz, which announced it would order 100,000 Tesla Model 3 vehicles to expand its own EV fleet. It has already began taking deliveries of the vehicles, despite puzzling comments by Tesla’s Elon Musk indicating that “no contract has been signed yet.” 🤔

Lyft reported earnings today and was profitable for the second time in the company’s history. That’s great and all, but the really exciting news was that Lyft’s growth was due to passengers and drivers using rideshare again after the pandemic. 😍

Lyft’s Co-Founder and CEO Logan Green commented on the company’s strong results: “We had a great quarter. Driver supply materially improved in Q3, up nearly 45% versus last year, reflecting strong new driver trends.”

Now that’s good stuff. 💰 Lyft reported net income of $17.8 million on its $864.4 million in revenue — overall revenue grew 13% QoQ (compare that to Lyft’s 280.4 million loss in Q3 2020). Lyft also posted an EPS of $0.05/share, beating analysts’ estimates by $0.08.

Lyft’s number of active riders reached 18.9 million versus 19.7 million expected. The company’s average revenue per rider ($45.63) also beat analysts’ expectations.

Lyft CFO Brian Roberts shared “Given our success onboarding new drivers and expected supply tailwinds, we anticipate our service levels will naturally improve in Q4 and lead to lower prices.”

$LYFT is up 12.4% after hours. 

It has been well-known for a while now that Netflix is venturing into the gaming space. 🎮

In July 2021, Bloomberg reported that the company planned to offer video games as part of a new push. The news came around the time the media giant was expanding into podcasting, an online shop, and even selling merch for some of its lucrative shows.

Today, the company is finally taking the first step in its gaming ambitions with the launch of Netflix Games. The Android-exclusive launch will include five games, including two themed around the platform’s star-studded original, “Stranger Things.” 🌟The company says it will make its way to iOS in the near future.

Five games doesn’t seem like a lot, but Netflix has foreshadowed about its ambitions for a bigger leap into gaming. In September, Netflix acquired award-winning studio Night School, the developers behind Oxenfree and Afterparty. 

Besides, if Netflix wants charge people more money, it’ll have to buy even more indie studios to build titles worthy of a price hike. 😅

$NFLX lost 0.51% today.

Under Armour surged 16.5% and had its best day since Oct 30, 2018. $UAA caught a bid after surpassing earnings and sales predictions. The sports equipment company also raised its outlook, expecting sales to rise 25%.

$UAA | EPS: $0.31 (vs. $0.15 expected) | Revenue: $1.55 billion (vs. $1.48 billion expected) | Link to Report

Digital Turbine shares tumbled 7.65% in after-hours trading following its Q2 earnings report. $APPS is up 59% YTD.

$APPS | EPS: $0.44 (vs. $0.39 expected) | Revenue: $310 million (vs. $306.5 million expected) | Link to Report

Match Group swiped left and missed earnings/sales estimates. $MTCH shares have closed the last 7 of 8 sessions negative and are down another 3% after hours. 

$MTCH | EPS: $0.43 (vs. $0.52 expected) | Revenue: $802 million (vs. $802.1 million expected) | Link to Report