What Happened?
Shares of mobile app advertising platform AppLovin (NASDAQ: APP) jumped 3.3% in the afternoon session after analysts at Scotiabank upgraded the stock to a "strong-buy" rating. The investment bank's positive reassessment of the mobile technology company has signaled renewed confidence in its growth prospects. This upgrade is the latest in a series of optimistic analyst ratings for AppLovin. Scotiabank's analyst highlighted that AppLovin has "blown through the Rule of 40," a key metric for software investors that balances revenue growth with profit margins. To pass the test, a company's combined growth rate and profit margin should exceed 40%.
After the initial pop the shares cooled down to $356.45, up 3.3% from previous close.
Is now the time to buy AppLovin? Access our full analysis report here, it’s free.
What Is The Market Telling Us
AppLovin’s shares are extremely volatile and have had 62 moves greater than 5% over the last year. In that context, today’s move indicates the market considers this news meaningful but not something that would fundamentally change its perception of the business.
AppLovin is up 4.3% since the beginning of the year, but at $356.45 per share, it is still trading 30.1% below its 52-week high of $510.13 from February 2025. Investors who bought $1,000 worth of AppLovin’s shares at the IPO in April 2021 would now be looking at an investment worth $5,467.
Today’s young investors won’t have read the timeless lessons in Gorilla Game: Picking Winners In High Technology because it was written more than 20 years ago when Microsoft and Apple were first establishing their supremacy. But if we apply the same principles, then enterprise software stocks leveraging their own generative AI capabilities may well be the Gorillas of the future. So, in that spirit, we are excited to present our Special Free Report on a profitable, fast-growing enterprise software stock that is already riding the automation wave and looking to catch the generative AI next.
