Tag: Square inc. (NYSE:SQ)

Fintech Duopoly: Square and PayPal

Posted on by Noah Kiedrowski

Fintech has been a multi-year growth story that’s still in its early innings, with Square (SQ) and PayPal (PYPL) leading the pack. Square recently announced a $29 billion, all-stock deal to buy Afterpay, a buy now and pay later platform. Square’s acquisition highlights consumers circumventing traditional credit, especially younger buyers, for installment loans. Payment players and financial technology, notably PayPal, also offer their own version of buy now and pay later. Both Square and PayPal enable businesses with a point of sale, analytics, peer-to-peer payments via Venmo (PayPal) and Cash App (Square), small business lending, cryptocurrency transactions, and support traditional credit card integrations into their platforms. Square and PayPal offer end-to-end financial solutions for businesses and consumers while powering the next generation of financial technology. These financial technology companies are creating additional revenue verticals while addressing unmet needs in the financial services space. Both Square and PayPal may offer long-term growth at reasonable valuations when factoring in their end markets are current growth rates.

Latest Earnings and Growth

The recent earnings reports by Square and PayPal highlight the massive trends and growth trends in the financial technology space. Square’s profit increased 91% from a year ago, which marked a record quarterly growth rate for the payments company. Cash App profit was up 94%, while seller jumped 85% from a year ago. Net revenue excluding bitcoin came in at $1.96 billion for the quarter, an 87% rise year-over-year. PayPal added 11.4 million net new active accounts for a total of 403 million active accounts. Revenue grew 19% year-over-year. Total payment volume grew 40% to $311 billion, while the Venmo app, which began supporting cryptocurrency services in April, saw payment volume grow 58% to $58 billion. Again, these companies are growing rapidly and clearly seeing widespread adoption across their financial solutions with cryptocurrency and buy now-pay later, serving as long-term catalysts. Continue reading "Fintech Duopoly: Square and PayPal" →

Covered Puts: An Alternative To Buy and Hold

Posted on by The INO.com Team

Options can provide an alternative approach to the traditional buy and hold for the long-term strategy. Options can add value to one’s portfolio in a variety of ways, specifically, maintaining liquidity via maintaining cash to engage in covered put options, initiating positions via being assigned shares strategically prior to or upon expiration of the option contract and capturing premium income via closing out the contract prior to expiration as the shares move in your favor to realize income. Here, I’ll discuss these three different scenarios and strategies behind each one with real life examples.

Maintaining Liquidity and Capturing Premium Income

Maintaining liquidity is integral to any portfolio as cash can be deployed in opportunistic scenarios to capitalize on sell-offs or adding to a long position that has corrected to lower cost basis. Covered puts can be implemented as a means to leverage cash on hand to sell contracts that are covered by cash. This cash would be deployed in an effort to maintain this cash balance yet be put to work via an option contract. This cash reserve can be utilized for selling covered puts thus not purchasing the underlying security with the end goal of never being assigned shares and netting premium income in the process. Once the contract expires, the covered cash allocated to the contract will be freed in addition to the cash that was realized from the option premium at expiration. This scenario will allow cash reserves to be maintained while adding cash via covered put contracts. Continue reading "Covered Puts: An Alternative To Buy and Hold" →

Square Just Made It A Lot Easier To Own Bitcoin

Posted on by Matt Thalman

Matt Thalman - INO.com Contributor - ETFs


A few weeks ago, Square’s Cash Application began allowing users to buy, sell, and hold the crypto-currency Bitcoin. Square’s Cash App, which is generally used to transfer money, has now unofficially endorsed the crypto-currency with what is essentially a trial offering to a limited number of Cash App customers. It should be noted that Square has allowed customers to use Bitcoin as a form of payment for nearly two years now, but customers needed to purchase their Bitcoin’s through other methods in the past.

In a statement, a Square spokesperson said, “We’re always listening to our customers, and we’ve found that they are interested in using the Cash App to buy Bitcoin. We’re exploring how Square can make this experience faster and easier, and have rolled out this feature to a small number of Cash App customers. We believe cryptocurrency can greatly impact the ability of individuals to participate in the global financial system and we’re excited to learn more here.”

Square’s Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey is a believer in crypto-currencies and the blockchain technology they are built on. He recently told an interviewer that blockchain is “the next big unlock.” The interview went further, and Dorsey disclosed that friends and family had asked him how they could buy Bitcoin, which may be an insight into why he has moved Square in its current direction. Continue reading "Square Just Made It A Lot Easier To Own Bitcoin" →