The Trade Desk Q4 FY12/24 Earnings Review

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Entropy, Captured

by Alex King, Cestrian Capital Research, Inc

In a world of increasing dispersion, where the open internet is growing at the expense of walled gardens, the ad-tech business you want to own is The Trade Desk ($TTD). To oversimplify, the company provides a centralized place where brands can reach consumers across a wide variety of online locations.

In a world of increasing centralization, where walled gardens are gaining share and using the monopoly rents to invest bigly in all manner of AI matters - LLMs, sunglasses (aka. live data ingestion devices for both training and inference), datacenter hardware &c - then the ad-tech business you want to own is probably one or more of META or GOOGL.

TTD printed earnings yesterday. The numbers look like a maturing business. The stock sold off hard in postmarket and remains down almost 30% in pre-market trading as I write.

We rate TTD at Hold because of the chart; there’s every chance it can recover from here. But I personally no longer own the name - I sold some time ago - and I have no plans to add. I think they need to reconsider their positioning.

Here’s the headlines.

Now for valuation, stock charts and price targets, and full financials.