PayPal shares edge higher on BMO upgrade, AMD stock rises after GS names it ‘top pick,’ bitcoin dips

Yahoo Finance's Julie Hyman and Jared Blikre discuss PayPal's climb after BMO upgraded it to outperform, AMD's rise after being named a "top pick" by Goldman Sachs, and the price of bitcoin.

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JARED BLIKRE: Welcome back. Time now for a look at some of Yahoo Finance's trending tickers. And Julie, I want to begin with the payments. We were talking about PayPal over the break. This is a trending ticker. Because I have our heat map for the payments system and the payment space up on the Wi-Fi interactive.

And you can see kind of a split field there. This is going back one year. So at the very top, we've got American Express, eBay up over 30%, Etsy et cetera, Shopify, Amazon, all in the green. But you take a look at some of the more traditional players, Mastercard is up 2.5%, Visa up 1%, PayPal down 17%. And it's been kind of a rough go for a lot of these companies over the last year, especially considering that these were once high flyers.

And I think it's notable too, I heard some rumblings in the later weeks of last year that they're going to be shifted. Currently these companies are in the tech sector according to GICS. That's a Global Industrial Classification System, something like that.

And they could be moving to the financials, which would make sense because you think of these companies as financial companies. But previously, when they IPOed, they were considered tech stocks.

And you can go all the way back to 2015 in PayPal. You can do this with MasterCard and Visa as well. And the charts look pretty similar, but they have each kind of stalled out over the last year, Julie.

JULIE HYMAN: Yeah. So today those PayPal shares are bouncing a little bit. They were upgraded to outperform from market perform over BMO capital markets. What's interesting about the call is it's not a very enthusiastic call.

It says, we believe PayPal faces uncertainty regarding the impact of competition, macroeconomic trends, and business mix on growth and margins. Hmm, that doesn't sound so great, does it. However, our gross margin sensitivity analysis-- whatever that is-- implies valuation risks are now skewed to the upside.

In other words, the outlook might not be great but maybe that's priced in at this point, I think is what we can distill that to say. So it's not exactly a ringing endorsement of business going forward. But it's an endorsement of the negativity being priced into the stock I suppose.

JARED BLIKRE: Yeah. I'd take that. I'd buy that too. That's just the space has a lot of competition, not the least of which is blockchain itself. I mean, the entire system of payments as we think about them, the custodial arrangements, all of that's being disrupted right now. And maybe it is a case that the big gains for a lot of these stocks are in the past. Certainly going to be a lot of competition going forward there.

Also, we got our eye on the semiconductor space. We talked about that Goldman note sending AMD higher a little bit ago. But also, if we take a look at this heat map-- look at this-- Taiwan Semi up 7%. No particular news that I could see. And Nvidia up over 3.5%. Xilinx-- that's the company that AMD is buying-- that stock is up-- what-- 4% right there.

So seeing a lot of positive movement to begin the year in this space. But one thing I took away from that Goldman note, and we were talking about this with an analyst earlier, I think there are going to be winners and losers in this space.

AMD has been eating Intel's lunch recently. Intel is up 2% today, but up only 5% over the last year. And you compare that with AMD, 65%, pretty stark difference there, Julie.

JULIE HYMAN: Yeah. Yeah, just quickly, Jared, the fact that you said the word blockchain before and that we're talking about these semiconductor makers, that in some cases power the miners, we haven't said the word Bitcoin today. Have we? Have we gotten through--

JARED BLIKRE: I think you just did.

JULIE HYMAN: --the first show of the year without saying Bitcoin? What's Bitcoin doing today, Jared?

JARED BLIKRE: Let's check it out on the Wi-Fi interactive. And wow, at my fingertips here, Bitcoin is down 1% over the trailing 24 hours. I want to get a five day view just to see what happened over the weekend, really not much.

We saw this big drop off Friday. We were covering that then into the evening. But not a whole lot of movement over the weekend. Just want to get a two month look at the price movement here.

JULIE HYMAN: Mmm, that's not a good looking one.

JARED BLIKRE: Yeah, the more times you touch potential support, the more it tends to break. So we'll have to see what happens there. But looking a little bit dicey on the Bitcoin front.