PYPL is a buying opportunity with ~39-40% upside over 12-18 months (fair value $77 vs price $55), though conviction is now low due to value trap risk.

PayPal shares are an interesting option . The low valuation and declining share price attract many buyers who make acquisition offers, which is reflected in the share price.

But does PayPal stock make sense for investors at current market prices ? This is the question I want to answer in this video, by looking at the company’s performance over the past few years, comparing it to its valuation, and determining whether it represents an attractive buying opportunity now.

Of course, the first place I like to start is with revenue and value propositions for customers. PayPal has done a great job of increasing revenue over the past decade, which has grown to over $34 billion after being around $10 billion in 2017.

PayPal offers the strongest value proposition for customers when shopping online. If you have a PayPal account and payment information is registered on it, you can buy products from different companies and save time instead of entering your credit card details on every new site.

This also adds a layer of security, as consumers feel comfortable using a PayPal account instead of entering credit card information on a new website.

But when people shop in person, PayPal becomes almost irrelevant. Here, PayPal needs to make more of an effort to expand its value proposition in those transactions.

But what works in PayPal's favor is that e-commerce sales as a percentage of total sales are increasing worldwide. You simply cannot match the convenience of online shopping .

Of course, PayPal is facing increasing competition, and this competition is what is causing the company's growth rate to slow down. The overall market opportunity is growing, but PayPal's role in that market is diminishing.

It remains to be seen whether PayPal’s current management team , the third in five years, is able to effectively meet this challenge. Profitability has been volatile for PayPal in recent years, but volatility remains confined to a low to mid-double-digit range .

More recently, it has approached the high range with an increase in operating profit margin to 19%, after being around 13% two years ago.

PayPal has many business sectors, and the Branded Checkout service is the most profitable and lucrative.

PayPal's management team is now focusing on the most profitable customers, and they say that's the area of intense focus, but I'm not convinced that this will be an effective strategy.

The best two-sided approach is because it creates a positive cycle. You need to work on both sides of the equation. You need to convince merchants to accept PayPal as a payment method, and you also need to convince consumers to use it as a payment method.

One of them helps the other, right ? The more merchants you convince to accept PayPal, the more attractive it becomes for consumers to use. The more consumers who sign up for and use PayPal, the more interested merchants will be in accepting it as a payment method.

Therefore, I don't think you can have one without the other, and focusing on only one side of the equation doesn't seem logical to me.

But I am not a CEO . I am not the one who runs the company, so it remains to be seen whether this strategy will be effective or not.

So let's see if PayPal's current strategy of focusing on high-value customers and emphasizing the consumer side of that equation will help to re-accelerate PayPal's revenue growth in the coming years.

The valuation is probably the reason why so many investors are talking about PayPal and why it's a hot topic of discussion as an acquisition target. PayPal is currently trading at a forward price-to-earnings ratio of 9.6 .

This price is almost the cheapest you've been able to buy PayPal shares for in many years.

This assessment treats PayPal stock as if its growth has ended. It's over . No further growth in the coming years. This assumes that PayPal will continue to lose market share. And that PayPal will not be able to respond to changing consumer dynamics and its diminishing role in e-commerce. This is what PayPal is pricing in today.

It has become an attractive target for acquirers who look at this company and see more than 400 million merchant and consumer accounts, hundreds of billions of dollars traded through its platform, the strong brand name that PayPal boasts, and the huge cash flow from the transactions it generates annually, and see it as an attractive target at these valuations.

I arrive at a similar result when I look at the valuation using a discounted cash flow model . I have calculated a fair value of 77. The current market price is 55. So , I see an upside opportunity here of around 39-40% over the next 12 to 18 months.

Of course, this could be achieved sooner if PayPal becomes a takeover target and is bought by some of the companies that are currently considering it. I sold my PayPal shares earlier this year when it was first announced that it was a takeover target and the share price jumped to around $50-$55 per share.

I sold my stake in PayPal at a loss. I had purchased my shares in PayPal at an average cost of about $68. And so I sold at a slight loss.

I sold because this was the third management team in 5 years, and none of them were able to solve the equation of declining market share and slowing revenue growth.

However, when looking at the work and the evaluation, it looks like a buying opportunity. It looks like an attractive asset when you look at it from this perspective. However, there is a growing risk that it will turn into a value trap rather than a valuable asset.

Therefore, I was classifying this stock as a buying opportunity, and I still believe that is the case. But I'm starting to lose confidence in this buying opportunity. I continued to lower my level of conviction.

I used to be very convinced and very confident that PayPal was an attractive buying opportunity. A few months ago, I lowered that to a moderate level of conviction , and today I lower it to a low level of conviction that this company is a buying opportunity.