The investor behind Opendoor’s 190% run nearly shut down his fund
Courtesy: Opendoor
On June 6, online real estate service Opendoor was so desperate to get its beaten-down stock price back over $1 and stay listed on the Nasdaq that management proposed a reverse split, potentially lifting the price of each share by as much as 50 times.
The stock inched its way up over the next five weeks.
Then Eric Jackson started cheerleading.
Jackson, a hedge fund manager who was bullish on Opendoor years earlier when the company appeared to be thriving and was worth roughly $20 billion, wrote on X on Monday that his firm, EMJ Capital, was back in the stock.
“@EMJCapital has taken a position in $OPEN — and we believe it could be a 100-bagger over the next few years,” Jackson wrote. He added later in the thread that the stock could get to $82.
It’s a long, long way from that mark.
Opendoor shares soared 189% this week, by far their best weekly performance since the company’s public market debut in late 2020. The stock closed on Friday at $2.25. The stock’s highest-volume trading days on record were Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of this week.
Jackson said in an interview on Thursday that the bulk of his firm’s Opendoor purchases came when the stock was in the 70s and 80s, meaning cents, and he’s bought options as well for his portfolio.
Nothing has fundamentally improved for the company since Jackson’s purchases. Opendoor remains a cash-burning, low-margin business with meager near-term growth prospects.
What has changed dramatically is Jackson’s online influence and the size of his following. The more he posts, the higher the stock goes.
“There’s a real hunger for buying the next big thing,” Jackson told CNBC, adding that investors like to find the “downtrodden.”
It’s something Jackson’s firm, based in Toronto, has in common with Opendoor.
When Opendoor went public through a special purpose acquisition company in 2020, it was riding a SPAC wave and broader gains driven by low interest rates and Covid-era market euphoria. Investors pumped money into the riskiest assets, lifting money-losing tech upstarts to astronomical valuations.
Opendoor’s business involved using technology to buy and sell homes, pocketing the gains. Zillow tried and failed to compete.
Opendoor shares peaked at over $39 in Feb. 2021 for a market cap just above $22.5 billion. But by the end of that year, the shares were trading below $15, before collapsing 92% in 2022 to end the year at $1.16.
Rising interest rates hammered the whole tech sector, hitting Opendoor particularly hard as increased borrowing costs reduced demand for homes.
Jackson, similarly, had a miserable 2022, coinciding with the worst year for the Nasdaq since 2008. Jackson said his key client withdrew its money at the end of the year, and “I’ve been small ever since.”
‘Epic comeback’
While his assets under management remain minimal, Jackson’s reputation for getting in early to a rebound story was burnished by the performance of Carvana.
The automotive e-commerce platform lost 98% of its value in 2022 as investors weighed the likelihood of bankruptcy. In the middle of that year, with Carvana still far from bottoming out, Jackson expressed his bullishness. He told CNBC that April that he liked the stock, and then promoted its recovery on a podcast in June. He also said he liked Opendoor at the time.
Investors willing to stomach further losses in 2022 were rewarded with a 1,000% gain in 2023, and a lot more upside from there. The stock closed on Friday at $347.52, up from a low of $3.72 in Dec. 2022, and almost triple its price at the time of Jackson’s appearance on CNBC in April of that year.
After Carvana’s 2022 slide, “then obviously began an epic comeback,” Jackson said. Opendoor, meanwhile, “continued to roll down the mountain,” he said.
Jackson said that the fallout of 2022 led him to pursue a different method of stockpicking. He started hiring a small team of developers, which is now four people, to build out artificial intelligence models. The firm has experimented with several models —some have worked and some haven’t — but he said the focus now is using what he’s learned from Carvana to find “100x” opportunities.
In addition to Opendoor, Jackson has been promoting IREN, a provider of power for bitcoin mining and AI workloads, and Cipher Mining, which is in a similar space. He’s seen his following on Elon Musk‘s social media site X, which he said was stuck for years between 32,000 and 34,000, swell to almost 50,000. And after a lengthy lull, investors are reaching out to him to try and put money into his fund, he said.
Jackson has a lot riding on Opendoor, a company that saw revenue and number of homes sold slip in the first quarter from a year earlier, and racked up almost $370 million in losses over the past four quarters.
In early June, Opendoor announced plans for a reverse split — ranging from 1 for 10 to 1 for 50 — to “give us optionality in preserving our listing on Nasdaq.” With the stock now well over $1, such a move appears less necessary, as shareholders prepare to vote on the proposal on July 28.
“I think it’s a terrible idea,” said Jackson. “Those things usually further cement a company’s move into oblivion rather than hail some big revival.”
Opendoor didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Banking on growth
Analysts are projecting a more than 5% drop in revenue this year, followed by 20% growth in 2026 and 12% expansion in 2017, according to LSEG. Losses are expected to narrow over that stretch.
Jackson said his analysis factors in projections of $11.5 billion in revenue for 2029, which would be well over double the company’s expected sales for this year. He looked at the multiples of companies like Zillow and Carvana, which he said trade for 4 to 7 times forward revenue. Opendoor’s forward price-to-sales ratio is currently well below 1.
With Zillow and Redfin having exited the instant-buying home market, Opendoor faces little competition in allowing homeowners to sell their property online for cash, rather than going through an extended bidding, sales and closing process.
Jackson is banking on revenue growth and increased market share to lead to a profitable business that will push investors to value the company with a multiple somewhere between Zillow and Carvana. At $82, Opendoor would be worth about $60 billion, which is roughly 5 times projected 2029 revenue.
Jackson said his model assumes that “like Carvana, Opendoor can prove that it can permanently turn the tide and get to sustained profitability” so that the “market multiple would get reassessed.”
In the meantime, he’ll keep posting on X.
On Friday, Jackson wrote a thread consisting of 11 posts, recounting the challenge of having “99.5% of my AUM” disappear overnight after his primary investor pulled out in 2022.
“Translation: he fired me for losing him too much money,” Jackson wrote. He said he almost shut down the fund, and was even encouraged to do so by his wife and accountant.
Now, Jackson is using his recent momentum on social media to try and attract investor money, while still reminding prospects that he could lose it.
“All I have is my reputation,” he wrote, “and, unless I keep picking good stocks, it will be gone.”
Industrial and infrastructure stocks may soon share the spotlight with the artificial intelligence trade.
According to ETF Action’s Mike Atkins, there’s a bullish setup taking shape due to both policy and consumer trends. His prediction comes during a volatile month for Big Tech and AI stocks.
“You’re seeing kind of the old-school infrastructure, industrial products that have not done as well over the years,” the firm’s founding partner told CNBC’s “ETF Edge” this week. “But there’s a big drive… kind of away from globalization into this reshoring concept, and I think that has legs.”
Global X CEO Ryan O’Connor is also optimistic because the groups support the AI boom. His firm runs the Global X U.S. Infrastructure Development ETF (PAVE), which tracks companies involved in construction and industrial projects.
“Infrastructure is something that’s near and dear to our heart based off of PAVE, which is our largest ETF in the market,” said O’Connor in the same interview. “We think some of these reshoring efforts that you can get through some of these infrastructure places are an interesting one.”
The Global X’s infrastructure exchange-traded fund is up 16% so far this year, while the VanEck Semiconductor ETF (SMH), which includes AI bellwethers Nvidia, Taiwan Semiconductor and Broadcom, is up 42%, as of Friday’s close.
Both ETFs are lower so far this month — but Global X’s infrastructure ETF is performing better. Its top holdings, according to the firm’s website, are Howmet Aerospace, Quanta Services and Parker Hannifin.
Supporting the AI boom
He also sees electrification as a positive driver.
“All of the things that are going to be required for us to continue to support this AI boom, the electrification of the U.S. economy, is certainly one of them,” he said, noting the firm’s U.S. Electrification ETF (ZAP) gives investors exposure to them. The ETF is up almost 24% so far this year.
The Global X U.S. Electrification ETF is also performing a few percentage points better than the VanEck Semiconductor ETF for the month.
-
Sports2 years agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports3 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports2 years agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Sports3 years agoButton battles heat exhaustion in NASCAR debut
-
Sports3 years agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports4 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Environment2 years agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Environment1 year agoHere are the best electric bikes you can buy at every price level in October 2024