Roku shares set for biggest daily percentage gain in four years

By Caroline Valetkevitch

NEW YORK (Reuters) -Shares of video streaming company Roku (NASDAQ:) Inc jumped 25% on Friday and were on track for their biggest daily percentage gain since May 2019 after the streaming device maker gave an upbeat quarterly revenue forecast.

Roku’s stock was last up 25.3% at $85.45 in afternoon trading and has more than doubled so far this year. The share move added about $2.5 billion to the company’s market capitalization, bringing it to $12 billion.

The company late Thursday also posted stronger-than-expected results for the quarter ended in June.

Roku’s strong guidance, beating consensus estimates on a pickup in digital ad sales, followed upbeat forecasts from Meta Platforms and results from Alphabet (NASDAQ:) earlier this week, as both companies also reported improved ad sales in the recent quarter.

Meta shares were up about 4% on Friday while Alphabet was up about 3%, helping to drive a roughly 1% gain in the .

Several brokerages raised their price targets on Roku after the news, including D.A. Davidson, which increased its price target to $81 and reiterated its “buy” rating on the stock.

“The company remains confident in its ability to exploit the secular shift of linear TV advertising dollars moving to over-the-top (OTT). With that said, management expects the current challenging ad trends to continue for,” the second half of the year, D.A. Davidson analysts wrote in a note Friday.

Roku said it added 1.9 million “active accounts” from the previous quarter to now reach 73.5 million.