Key Stats for The Trade Desk Stock
- Current Price: $23.08
- Target Price (Mid): ~$42
- Street Target: ~$30
- Potential Total Return: ~81%
- Annualized IRR: ~14% / year
- Earnings Reaction: -1.75% (May 7, 2026)
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What Happened?
The Trade Desk (TTD) fell 1.75% on May 7 after its Q1 2026 earnings call, closing at $23.08. The stock is now down 77.62% from its 52-week high of $91.45. Bulls see a market-leading platform near multi-year lows, with a CEO who recently made a significant personal purchase of TTD stock. Bears see decelerating growth, margin compression, a string of senior executive departures, and an unresolved dispute with a major agency group. The question every investor is asking is whether this slowdown is cyclical or structural. CEO and Co-Founder Jeff Green addressed that directly on the May 7 call, and his answers deserve more attention than the headline numbers.
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A Mixed Quarter
Q1 2026 revenue came in at $688.86 million, up 12% year over year, beating the Street consensus of around $678 million. Adjusted EBITDA was $206 million at a 30% margin, compressing from 34% in Q1 2025. Adjusted EPS of $0.28 missed the $0.32 consensus. Free cash flow for the trailing twelve months stands at $588 million per TIKR data.
Q2 guidance of at least $750 million implies around 8% year-over-year growth. For a company that compounded revenue at around 28% annually over the prior five years, per TIKR data, that is a sharp step down.
The earnings call also coincided with Adweek’s report that Chief Strategy Officer Samantha Jacobson is departing to join OpenAI as VP of Partnerships for Monetization, retaining a seat on The Trade Desk’s board. Her exit follows the earlier departures of CFO Alexander Kayyal and CMO Ian Colley. Green confirmed the news on the call: “Working with Samantha has been one of the highlights of my career,” he said. “She’s smart and humble, and she’s just generally amazing.”
What Green Said That the Headlines Missed
The dominant narrative heading into earnings was that growth is slowing, Publicis is a problem, and the leadership bench is thinning. Green pushed back on all three.
On Publicis, he said the conflict had been overdramatized and confirmed that negotiations for the next phase of the partnership are ongoing, with billions in business transacted between the two companies since 2018. When asked whether agency dynamics were behind the Q2 deceleration, he said there was nothing incremental to add on the agency front. That framing does not fit the picture of a company losing a critical relationship.
On the deceleration, Green separated structural from cyclical. The structural story: Disney, Spotify, NBCU, and Netflix are all deepening their investment in biddable, programmatic inventory because it is the only path to higher CPMs without increasing ad loads. The cyclical headwind: CPG and automotive brands are pulling back under tariff pressure and consumer softness, which Green said would have the business growing faster in their absence.
The operational data support his distinction. March 2026 was the company’s biggest month on record for Joint Business Partnership signings, with 45 JBPs signed in that month alone. Total JBP count grew 55% year over year in Q1, and new JBP deal spend grew 40% year over year, excluding renewals. Green also described a direct competitive win over Amazon: a major pharmaceutical advertiser that had shifted spend to Amazon’s programmatic guaranteed offering returned to The Trade Desk and signed a JBP that increases its spend on the platform by 114% year over year. The brand had initially been drawn by lower rates. Measurable outcomes brought it back.
On agentic AI, Green’s argument sets The Trade Desk apart from most of the companies being discussed in the same context. He said most agentic ad solutions are recreating the flaws of the old ad network model, connecting one advertiser to one publisher through an agent and losing the ability to evaluate all available inventory at once. The Trade Desk evaluates around 20 million ad opportunities per second and selects the best few hundred for each advertiser’s specific goal. The Koa Agents partnership with Stagwell, announced this quarter, is the first commercial step in applying that capability through an agentic layer.
On measurement, Green argued the industry’s over-reliance on last-touch attribution has structurally undervalued premium inventory, including CTV and audio, in favor of bottom-of-funnel walled garden placements. A top-20 brand CMO he met with recently described chasing cheap lower-funnel reach as a race to the bottom of the business. If that perspective spreads among major brand marketers, the platform that buys the most premium open internet inventory is positioned to benefit.
Peer Comparison and Street Sentiment
Against TIKR’s Competitors page, The Trade Desk trades at 3.02x NTM EV/Revenue and 7.55x NTM EV/EBITDA. Magnite (MGNI) trades at 2.92x NTM EV/Revenue and 8.39x NTM EV/EBITDA. DoubleVerify (DV) trades at 1.99x NTM EV/Revenue and 5.92x NTM EV/EBITDA. TTD’s revenue multiple premium over ad-tech peers has largely disappeared, meaning the stock’s recovery hinges on demonstrating reacceleration rather than multiple expansion.
The Street currently has 15 Buy ratings, 2 Outperforms, 18 Holds, 1 Underperform, and 1 Sell, with a mean price target of $30.18, implying around 31% upside from the current price. That mean has fallen from $107.84 as of March 2025, per TIKR Street Targets data.
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TIKR Advanced Model Analysis
- Current Price: $23.08
- Target Price (Mid): ~$42
- Potential Total Return: ~81%
- Annualized IRR: ~14% / year
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The mid-case scenario targets ~$42 by 12/31/30. The two primary revenue CAGR drivers are CTV, which represented a low-50s percent of Q1 revenue mix per Interim CFO Tahnil Davis on the earnings call, and retail media, where the company’s data marketplace covers retailers representing more than 80% of top U.S. retailer sales. The mid-case assumes around 8% annual revenue growth and net income margins expanding to around 32% by 12/31/30, per the TIKR model.
The primary risk is a structural growth stall. If persistent agency pressure or share losses to Amazon DSP prevent reacceleration, the mid-case does not hold. The high case points to around $66 by 12/31/30. The low case points to around $38, still above today’s price but with materially lower returns. Both figures are from the TIKR valuation model.
The TIKR model entry price is $23.08.
Conclusion
The metric to watch at the next earnings report is Q2 revenue against the at-least-$750-million guide. Outperformance above that floor is the clearest signal that the deceleration is cyclical. In one sentence: The Trade Desk is the only scaled, independent DSP serving the world’s largest advertisers, and at $23, the stock may be pricing in a permanent impairment that the underlying business has not earned.
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Should You Invest in The Trade Desk?
The only way to really know is to look at the numbers yourself. TIKR gives you free access to the same institutional-quality financial data that professional analysts use to answer exactly that question.
Pull up The Trade Desk, and you’ll see years of historical financials, what Wall Street analysts expect for revenue and earnings in the quarters ahead, how valuation multiples have moved over time, and whether price targets are trending up or down.
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Disclaimer:
Please note that the articles on TIKR are not intended to serve as investment or financial advice from TIKR or our content team, nor are they recommendations to buy or sell any stocks. We create our content based on TIKR Terminal’s investment data and analysts’ estimates. Our analysis might not include recent company news or important updates. TIKR has no position in any stocks mentioned. Thank you for reading, and happy investing!
