Reddit stock: Buy, sell, or hold?

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I have spent the entire week live on Opening Bid discussing tech.

Nvidia's (NVDA) record-high stock price.

Circle's (CRCL) exploding — then plunging — stock price.

Micron's (MU) surprisingly strong quarter, coming a day after FedEx's (FDX) limp quarter suggested economic weakness ahead.

The potential of a new tech bubble as traders pile into the July 30 rate cut from the Federal Reserve narrative.

But all week long, I didn't mention a single social media name. No Meta (META). No Snap (SNAP). No Reddit (RDDT).

I should've mentioned Reddit, however.

While the stock is playing its part in the major jump in tech stocks the past month (+37%), shares are still down 14% year to date amid fears that Google's AI initiatives will drive traffic away from Reddit content.

After talking with experts this past week and earlier at the Cannes Lions conference, I think the relative underperformance of Reddit's stock versus the market is overdone.

"Reddit is at the epicenter of disruptive finance and a major player in the years ahead," Wedbush tech analyst Dan Ives told me.

The company has greatly improved the content quality on its platform, attracting advertisers' interest. It's also making a large investment in AI-powered search to serve up more relevant content.

Reddit COO Jen Wong told me at Cannes Lions (video above) that the company is all in on AI.

"Reddit is a lot of conversation in words, so AI allows us to machine translate global conversations into multiple languages, and we're doing this today in French and German, in fact, and in almost 12 different languages," Wong said. "And these are conversations that are about universal life experiences, like parenting or pop culture."

The company is defending its business against AI chatbot startup and web scraper Anthropic (and others of its ilk). That could have a positive outcome for the business.

"What's important to us is that we are able to protect our users' privacy, their deletion rights, like we have policies that ensure that when users take down a post, the post is taken down," Wong said. "And so it's really important, and as we've said in our terms of service, that we have a conversation with folks who have access to our data because that's a commitment that we have in terms of our policies, and it's also to know how Reddit data is used."

Reddit filed a new lawsuit earlier this month claiming that Anthropic intentionally scraped its users' personal data without their consent. Anthropic then allegedly used that data to train its large language model Claude.

On the other hand, content publishers such as Reddit continue to face challenges in the AI age. Big Tech has been forking over cash for licensing agreements to use publishers' archives to train large language models.

The New York Times (NYT) recently inked a multiyear deal to license content to Amazon (AMZN) for AI-related uses, marking its first generative AI contract. In 2023, the company sued OpenAI and Microsoft (MSFT), alleging the tech companies illegally used millions of its articles to train chatbots.

News Corp. (NWS), owner of the Wall Street Journal, signed a five-year licensing deal with OpenAI in May 2024 worth a reported $250 million.

For its part, Reddit struck a deal with Google (GOOG, GOOGL) in 2024 that allows the search giant to use posts from its site to train its AI models. The arrangement was reported to be worth $60 million.

It also signed a similar deal with OpenAI in 2024.

I fancy more of these are coming later this year due to the value of Reddit's human-generated content. Anthropic will probably end up paying up too.

Wall Street is taking notice of the Reddit story.

Two sell-side analyst notes caught my attention this week:

"Overall, we come away with the view that Reddit has a viable strategy to reduce the current top-of-funnel user volatility ... we have a greater appreciation of the durability of current revenue growth given the strong ARPU (average revenue per user) tailwinds and the fact that the vast amount of monetization currently comes from logged-in users which are showing far less volatility," Deutsche Bank analyst Benjamin Black wrote. "Moreover, the company remains front-footed on product, rolling out Dynamic Shopping Ads this quarter, refining Reddit Answers, in addition to working on a growing suite of automation tools."

"As an aside, Reddit came up in most of our conversations with marketers, brands, and agencies suggesting significant growth in awareness amongst this community. The net/net here, we come away from our meeting incrementally positive on shares of Reddit," Citi analyst Ron Josey wrote.

I won't sit here and blow smoke that Reddit's stock is cheap from a valuation perspective.

Shares trade on a forward P/E multiple of 113 times, according to Yahoo Finance data. However, if the market is going to strongly embrace high-multiple tech names again (as seen currently), then Reddit could be worth a look.

The company is growing its top and bottom lines by double digits, isn't weighed down by money-losing hardware businesses like Meta, and is crushing Snap in terms of execution.

Those are things you can get behind, provided you are bullish on tech.

Brian Sozzi is Yahoo Finance's Executive Editor and a member of Yahoo Finance's editorial leadership team. Follow Sozzi on X @BrianSozzi, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Tips on stories? Email [email protected].

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