Benzinga | Nov 17, 2021 12:41PM EST

Why PayPal Shares Are Falling

Paypal Holdings Inc (NASDAQ:PYPL) shares are trading lower after Bernstein downgraded the stock from Outperform to Market Perform and lowered its price target from $260 to $220.

Among the main concerns Bernstein has with PayPal: "We worry about well-funded onslaught and accelerating innovation (on BNPL, commerce, super app) from nimbler peers such as Shopify Inc (NYSE:SHOP), Stripe, Square Inc (NYSE:SQ), Klarna, Affirm Holdings Inc (NASDAQ:AFRM), etc. While PayPal is actively investing and evolving, it simply has more turf to defend vs. peers in our view," said Bernstein analyst Harshita Rawat in a note.

PayPal was spun off from eBay in 2015 and provides electronic payment solutions to merchants and consumers, with a focus on online transactions. The company had 377 million active accounts at the end of 2020, including 29 million merchant accounts.

PayPal has a 52-week high of $310.16 and a 52-week low of $189.54.