Roblox
stock was sinking Thursday after the videogame platform released earnings that included a dialed-back financial forecast.
Roblox stock was down 21% to $30.80 on Thursday, putting it in line for its biggest daily loss since Aug. 23, when it lost 22%, according to Dow Jones Market Data. That brings its loss for the year to about 33%.
The
S&P 500
was up 0.3% on Thursday for a year-to-date gain of 9.1%.
Big moves on earnings days aren’t uncommon for Roblox stock. Since it went public in March 2021, the stock’s average absolute move on earnings days is about 16%, not including Thursday’s drop.
The earnings themselves were fine. The company posted a fiscal first-quarter loss of 43 cents, narrower than the loss of 53 cents Wall Street had expected, according to FactSet. Bookings, a form of adjusted revenue preferred by videogame analysts, were $923.8 million, up 19% from a year earlier and above the consensus call for $919 million.
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The problems started with the guidance. For its fiscal second quarter, the company said it expects bookings between $870 million and $900 million, sharply below analysts’ call for $929 million.
For its full year 2024, bookings are expected between $4 billion and $4.1 billion, compared with an earlier forecast of $4.14 billion to $4.28 billion. Analysts had penciled in $4.18 billion.
“Our Q2 2024 bookings guidance incorporates slower growth in the first half of April as we lapped comparisons with the Easter holiday last year, but also includes recent evidence of improved growth in DAUs [average daily active users], Hours, Revenue, and Bookings,” the company said in a letter to shareholders.
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“For the full year, we are basically matching the bookings growth rate we expect to achieve in 1H 2024, with…
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