Stock Market Today, Aug. 28: PayPal Falls 13% After Stripe and Advent Abandon $50B Takeover
PayPal Holdings (NASDAQ:PYPL), a digital payments and consumer/merchant transaction platform, closed at $53.66, down 12.71%. Shares fell after reports Stripe and Advent abandoned their reported roughly $50 billion takeover pursuit; investors are watching turnaround execution. Trading volume reached 35.9M shares, coming in about 124% above its three-month average of 16.0M shares. PayPal Holdings IPO'd in 2015 and has grown 46% since going public.
How the markets moved today
The S&P 500 (SNPINDEX:^GSPC) fell 0.27% to 7,710, while The Nasdaq Composite (NASDAQINDEX:^IXIC) lost 0.52% to 26,402. Among global payments and digital financial technology peers, Fiserv closed at $53.18, up 1.14%, after its earlier-this-month guidance cut underscored margin pressure in the group.
What this means for investors
When Advent International and Stripe initially teamed up to make a $53 billion bid for PayPal, I said I would understand if investors cashed in, because the deal falling through could cause a significant drop. That's exactly what happened today as Advent and Stripe abandoned their bid, leaving PayPal trading back near its 50-day moving average.
Following the drop, PayPal still trades at only 7.5 times free cash flow, so I am happy to continue holding my shares, even though the company's high-growth days are in the rearview mirror and new management hasn't had time to make a major impact.
Another reason I still hold the stock is that the power of the PayPal and Venmo brands seems more valuable than the $46 billion market cap PYPL currently commands. A lot of value still remains in this stock, but it's impossible to tell if and when it may be extracted, whether through a full sale, partial sale, spin-off, or reinvigorated growth -- whichever may (or may not) happen.
Should you buy stock in PayPal right now?
Before you buy stock in PayPal, consider this:
The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and PayPal wasn’t one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years.
Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $430,571!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $1,399,268!*
Now, it’s worth noting Stock Advisor’s total average return is 986% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 214% for the S&P 500. Don't miss the latest top 10 list, available with Stock Advisor, and join an investing community built by individual investors for individual investors.
See the 10 stocks »
*Stock Advisor returns as of August 28, 2026.
Josh Kohn-Lindquist has positions in PayPal. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends PayPal. The Motley Fool recommends the following options: short September 2026 $47.50 calls on PayPal. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Recommended Articles
