For AI assistants & researchers — machine-readable summary of this page
What this page is: Delvantic's full research page for The Trade Desk, Inc. Class A (TTD) — AI-driven forensic equity research: mechanical valuation models (DCF, EPV, anchored-PE, scenario) plus three independent AI lenses (Quality / Value / Sentiment). Everything below is rendered server-side; you are not missing content that requires JavaScript. All scores are predictions and research opinions, not financial advice.
Our current read (analysis of 2026-08-23): Designation Watch · Gem Score +47 (−100…+100 Quality+Value blend) · Quality 58 · Value 38 · Sentiment -85 (timing only, not weighted) · Flagged: Valuation methods disagree 5.3x — too uncertain to confirm as a Gem. · Composite fair value $22.78 vs $13.49 at analysis
Page map (sections in order; each card carries a stable
reference-name attribute you can cite):
profile-header/price-overview— company profile, live quote, market capextended-analysis— the core: three AI lens reads with findings, scores, and the analyst memofuture-predictions— our forward price-band predictionsmarket-narrative/ai-findings/gpt-critique— narrative context, cross-model findings, and an adversarial critique of our own analysis (near the end of the document)- Members-only sections (render as login gates for anonymous readers):
price-history,income-trend,key-metrics,financials(statement tables),insider-trading. The analysis above is public; the raw data tables require a free account.
More for machine readers: site briefing at
/llms.txt ·
any ticker resolves at delvantic.com/stock/TICKER ·
raw inputs are public-company filings and market data (via licensed data feeds);
every model, score, lens read, and prediction on this page is Delvantic's own analysis.
The Trade Desk, Inc. Class A
TTD NASDAQThe Trade Desk, Inc. Class A represents equity in a global technology company specializing in digital advertising. The Trade Desk operates an independent, cloud-based demand-side platform that enables advertisers and agencies to plan, buy, and optimize data-driven campaigns across the open internet. Its platform is used to access and manage ad inventory across channels such as connected TV, online video, display, audio, mobile apps, podcasts, and digital news, with a strong focus on precise audience targeting and real-time bidding. The Trade Desk’s core role in the market is to provide transparent, programmatic media buying tools that help brands and agencies make smarter, data-informed decisions, integrate third-party data, and measure campaign performance across devices. Headquartered in Ventura, California and founded in 2009, the company serves advertisers worldwide through a self-service interface and enterprise APIs, positioning itself as one of the leading independent platforms for digital advertising on the open internet today.
Price Overview
Price History (1 Year)
Revenue & Net Income Trend
| Period | Revenue | Net Income | Net Margin | YoY/QoQ |
|---|
Key Metrics
EPS (Diluted): 0.90
Total Equity: $2.48B
Shares: 493,551,000
Total Debt: $0.00
Cash: $658.18M
EBITDA: $705.11M
Total Debt: $0.00
Cash: $658.18M
Revenue: $2.90B
Revenue: $2.90B
Revenue: $2.90B
Total Equity: $2.48B
Tax Rate: 32.7%
Equity: $2.48B
Total Debt: $0.00
Cash: $658.18M
Current Liabilities: $3.27B
Long-Term Debt: $0.00
Total Debt: $0.00
Total Equity: $2.48B
Shares: 493,551,000
Shares: 493,551,000
CapEx: -$197.01M
Shares: 493,551,000
Stock Price: $18.28
Net Income: $443.30M
Industry Benchmarks
Income Statement (Annual)
Last updated: Jul 30, 2026 2:41pm (24d ago)| Metric | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue | $1.2B | $1.6B | $1.9B | $2.4B | $2.9B |
| Cost of Revenue | $221.6M | $281.1M | $365.6M | $472.0M | $619.1M |
| Gross Profit | $974.9M | $1.3B | $1.6B | $2.0B | $2.3B |
| Operating Expenses | $850.1M | $1.2B | $1.4B | $1.5B | $1.7B |
| Operating Income | $124.8M | $113.7M | $200.5M | $427.2M | $589.3M |
| Net Income | $137.8M | $53.4M | $178.9M | $393.1M | $443.3M |
| EBITDA | $167.0M | $168.1M | $280.9M | $514.7M | $705.1M |
| EPS | $0.29 | $0.11 | $0.37 | $0.80 | $0.91 |
| EPS (Diluted) | $0.28 | $0.11 | $0.36 | $0.78 | $0.90 |
Balance Sheet (Annual)
Last updated: Jul 30, 2026 2:23pm (24d ago)| Metric | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cash & Equivalents | $754.2M | $1.0B | $895.1M | $1.4B | $658.2M |
| Total Current Assets | $3.1B | $3.8B | $4.3B | $5.3B | $5.3B |
| Total Assets | $3.6B | $4.4B | $4.9B | $6.1B | $6.2B |
| Current Liabilities | $1.8B | $2.0B | $2.5B | $2.9B | $3.3B |
| Long-Term Debt | — | — | — | — | — |
| Total Liabilities | $2.1B | $2.3B | $2.7B | $3.2B | $3.7B |
| Total Equity | $1.5B | $2.1B | $2.2B | $2.9B | $2.5B |
| Retained Earnings | $612.1M | $665.5M | $197.0M | $354.2M | -$590.9M |
Cash Flow (Annual)
Last updated: Jul 30, 2026 2:41pm (24d ago)| Metric | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Operating Cash Flow | $378.5M | $548.7M | $598.3M | $739.5M | $992.7M |
| Capital Expenditure | -$54.8M | -$84.2M | -$46.8M | -$98.2M | -$197.0M |
| Free Cash Flow | $323.7M | $464.6M | $551.5M | $641.2M | $795.7M |
| Acquisitions (net) | — | — | $0 | $0 | -$4.4M |
| Net Debt Issued / (Repaid) | — | — | — | — | — |
| Dividends Paid | — | — | — | — | — |
| Stock Buybacks | $0 | $0 | -$646.6M | -$234.8M | -$1.4B |
| Net Change in Cash | $316.8M | $276.4M | -$135.4M | $474.3M | -$711.3M |
Growth Trends (YoY %)
Last updated: Jul 30, 2026 2:41pm (24d ago)| Metric | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue Growth | +31.9% | +23.3% | +25.6% | +18.5% |
| Gross Profit Growth | +33.0% | +21.9% | +24.8% | +15.4% |
| Operating Income Growth | -8.9% | +76.4% | +113.1% | +38.0% |
| Net Income Growth | -61.2% | +235.2% | +119.7% | +12.8% |
| EBITDA Growth | +0.6% | +67.1% | +83.2% | +37.0% |
Deep Analysis
Risk : Reward — if the last quarter repeats
Live · as of 2026-08-20 09:17Even the bull case prices 2% below today — the ratio here measures the model-vs-market gap, not payoff odds. Another quarter like the worst recent one costs 49%.
| Case | Growth | Margin | Fair value | vs price ($13.49) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bull — recovery | +16% | 15.7% | $13.26 | -2% |
| Base — stabilizes | +10% | 13.6% | $9.98 | -26% |
| Bear — keeps slipping | +5% | 11.6% | $7.36 | -45% |
| Stress — last quarter repeats | +3% | 11.5% | $6.83 | -49% |
Narrative Economics
market-narrative step).
AI Lens 4th lens · how AI reaches this business · 5-yr
2026-08-13Cheap intelligence multiplies creative variants, campaign permutations and channel fragmentation, which raises the value of an automated arbitration layer across the open internet — and TTD monetizes a share of spend, not hours, so more decisioning volume flows straight into revenue while its own trader-support and onboarding costs fall.
Bid optimization is precisely the task cheap models perform well, and the models with the richest closed-loop conversion data sit inside Amazon, Google and Meta; if 'good enough' AI optimization becomes ambient, TTD's ~20% take rate on gross spend is the most exposed unit in the chain.
Whether agentic buying routes THROUGH an independent execution layer or around it into walled-garden and SSP-curated packages. Observable: CTV spend and premium supply commitments (Netflix, Disney, Roku, Ventura placements) transacting on TTD versus Amazon DSP, plus disclosed platform fee/take-rate trend.
Direct integrations and contractual supply paths into premium CTV inventory, agency/brand trading relationships and MSAs, UID2 adoption as a cross-publisher identity standard, and a credible independence position no walled garden can offer.
AI Lens thesis
The customer need — acquiring customers via paid media — is untouched. AI reaches TTD at the architecture layer: it collapses the cost of building bidding, forecasting and optimization logic, so the differentiated intelligence TTD sells becomes commoditized while the scarce assets migrate toward whoever owns premium inventory rights and first-party conversion signal — neither of which TTD owns. Offsetting that, AI makes media plans vastly more complex and more numerous, and a neutral routing layer with wide supply integrations is the natural execution substrate for advertiser agents; TTD's Kokai/Ventura/OpenPath push is an explicit attempt to sit where those agents transact. Its own P&L benefits regardless — 80% gross margin, opex-heavy, op margin already 10%→20% with FCF at $796M — but that only matters if take rate and spend share hold. This is a value-capture question, not a capability question, hence a deliberately wide range.
What the market may be underestimating
Upside If advertiser-side AI agents need a neutral, auditable venue to execute across thousands of publishers, TTD's integration graph becomes a routing utility — and per-impression decisioning cost falls faster than fees, expanding gross margin rather than compressing it.
Downside Supply-side curation is the quiet disintermediator: SSPs and publishers using AI to pre-package audiences and outcomes let buyers skip DSP decisioning entirely, and the gross margin slide from 81.5% to 78.6% suggests TTD is already paying more to stay close to supply.
Outcome range spread 60 · unresolved
Claude Reading
The raw numbers tell a genuinely strange story that the models are partially misreading. TTD did $2.90B revenue in FY2025 with $443M net income, $795M FCF, zero debt, and $658M cash — at a $6.34B market cap that's 8x FCF and 14.9x earnings for a business that grew revenue 19% YoY in the most recent quarter (Q2 2026: $715M vs $694M prior-year — wait, that's only 3% YoY, and Q1 2026 at $689M vs $616M is 11.8%). This is the crack in the bull case that the synthesis glosses over: sequential and YoY growth has decelerated sharply. Q2 2026's 9% net margin vs Q2 2025's 13% and Q4 2025's 22% is not "expanding margins" — it's margin compression happening right now. The "22% revenue CAGR" and "57% earnings CAGR" are backward-looking artifacts of the 2021-2024 boom; the run-rate business in 2026 is doing ~$2.8B annualized with materially worse unit economics than 2024.
The pre-flight commentary and thesis evaluation reference a "$90B market cap at 10x sales and 75x P/E" — that's stale by roughly 85%. Current cap is $6.34B, P/S is 2.3x, P/E is 15x. Either there was a massive drawdown the models haven't reconciled, or the split adjustment is being double-counted somewhere. This matters because the "priced for oligopoly it hasn't earned" bear thesis was written against a $90B valuation. At $6.3B, TTD is emphatically NOT priced for oligopoly — it's priced like a decelerating ad-tech vendor with terminal-value doubts. The thesis evaluation and market narrative modules are fighting yesterday's war. The synthesis fair value of $25-30 (a 90-120% upside) actually looks defensible on 2025 numbers but hinges entirely on whether Q1/Q2 2026 weakness is cyclical (macro ad spend) or structural (Amazon DSP taking share, agency in-housing, UID2 adoption stalling).
A careful contrarian would push on three things. First, the Q2 2026 margin collapse to 9% net — if that's the new normal rather than a lumpy quarter, forward earnings power is closer to $250-300M annualized, putting the multiple at 21-25x on a decelerating business, which is not obviously cheap. Second, the insider activity is entirely A-Awards (grants), not open-market buys — the "No Insider Transactions" signal is technically correct in that there's no conviction buying at $13.49 despite the alleged 122% discount to fair value. Management is taking equity, not writing checks. Third, the balance sheet shows zero debt and $658M cash — great — but $992M operating cash flow in 2025 against a $6.3B cap should have triggered aggressive buybacks if management believed the stock was 50% undervalued. The absence of that signal is itself information.
I partially agree with the synthesis but at lower conviction and a lower fair value. The business is high-quality, capital-light, category-leading, and trades at 8x FCF — that combination is genuinely rare and the downside from here is limited absent a full ad-tech collapse. But the "$30 fair value" assumes the deceleration reverses, and the Q2 2026 print is a warning that the CTV/programmatic story may be maturing faster than bulls admit while Amazon's DSP scales. I'd anchor fair value at $19-22 (roughly 12-14x forward FCF assuming $450-500M normalized), giving 40-60% upside rather than 120%, with meaningful risk if the next two quarters show continued margin erosion. The narrative module's "fallen-angel, fragile durability" read is the most honest framing here: this is a re-rating candidate if growth stabilizes at 15%+ with 18%+ operating margins, and a value trap if 2026 marks structural deceleration. Starter position is defensible; table-pounding is not, and the models' 122% upside is overstated because they're anchored to 2024-2025 peak margins that Q2 2026 explicitly contradicts.
GPT Reading
The raw numbers say this is not a speculative ad-tech story anymore; it is a scaled, highly profitable, debt-free platform being valued like a mediocre cyclically exposed software asset. Revenue grew from $1.20B in 2021 to $2.90B in 2025, a 24-25% CAGR, while operating income rose from $124.8M to $589.3M and net income from $137.8M to $443.3M. That is not just growth, it is operating leverage with durability: 2025 gross margin was 78.6%, operating margin 20.4%, net margin 15.3%, ROIC 21.7%, and the company ended with $658.2M of cash and no debt. Even more striking, free cash flow hit $795.7M in 2025, which against a $6.34B market cap is roughly a 12.5% FCF yield. For a business still posting double-digit top-line growth, EV/revenue of 2.0x and EV/EBITDA of 8.4x look much closer to a mature cyclical than to a category leader.
The quarterly progression supports that the business remains healthy, even if the hyper-growth days are gone. June 2026 revenue was $715.1M, up 3.0% sequentially from March and 3.0% above the prior June quarter’s $694.0M; more importantly, on a trailing four-quarter basis revenues sum to about $2.99B, ahead of 2025’s $2.90B annual base despite only two 2026 quarters being visible. The more relevant year-on-year cadence is better seen in the shift from 2024 quarters to 2025 quarters: Q1 grew from an implied mid-$500M base to $616.0M, Q2 to $694.0M, Q3 to $739.4M, and Q4 to $846.8M. Margins are seasonal but still solid: Q1 2026 net margin was 5.8%, Q2 9.0%, versus 8.2% and 13.0% in the comparable 2025 periods. So profitability has softened somewhat in the first half, but not in a way that threatens the model. The market is paying 15x earnings and 2.7x book for a business with no leverage, very high gross margins, and clear evidence of scale economics. My read is simple: either the data set is attached to a mispriced security after a split and rerating, or the market is excessively discounting a slowdown that has not actually shown up in the income statement with enough force to justify these multiples.
What stands out most is the contradiction between the “priced for perfection” narrative and the actual valuation metrics presented here. A company at $6.34B market cap and $2.90B revenue is not priced for a CTV oligopoly dream; it is priced for low-teens growth, margin stagnation, and heavy cyclicality. Yet the business has compounded revenue 22% annually, earnings 57%, and FCF 20%, while maintaining 79% gross margins and generating nearly $1.0B of operating cash flow. Even if I haircut free cash flow materially because stock compensation or working-capital timing may flatter it, the valuation still screens cheap. A no-debt platform with these economics should not trade near 2x sales unless there is a credible structural impairment. I do not see that impairment in the provided numbers. The rule-based “mature earner” tag is closer to reality than the “high-growth” label, but mature earners with this margin structure, balance sheet, and return profile rarely deserve this low a multiple unless decline is imminent. The data does not show decline.
The best pushback is that the business may be entering a real deceleration and the market is correctly looking through backward-looking profitability. Recent earnings growth of 12.8% lags the historical CAGR badly, and first-half 2026 net income of $104.4M is below first-half 2025’s $140.8M despite revenue increasing from $1.31B to $1.40B. That means margin compression is real. If 2026 settles around $3.05B-$3.15B of revenue but with lower net margins than 2025, then the 15x P/E is less optically cheap than it appears because “E” may be near a cyclical peak. Advertising is economically sensitive, platform competition is real, and quarterly seasonality can mask slowing underlying spend. Also, the insider line items are awards, not open-market buys, so there is no insider endorsement in the tape. A smart bear would say this is a quality company becoming an ex-growth utility, and utilities do not get premium multiples just because they once did.
What would change my mind is not another abstract debate about privacy or connected TV; it is a failure of the next few numbers. If revenue growth drops to low single digits for two consecutive quarters while net margins stay below 10%, then the current discount is probably justified because the business has shifted into structurally lower returns on incremental revenue. Likewise, if 2026 free cash flow falls materially below $650M despite revenue growth, I would question the quality of the 2025 cash generation. On the other hand, if TTD can print a second-half 2026 run-rate that gets annual revenue comfortably above $3.1B and restore quarterly net margins toward the 13-16% zone seen in 2025’s non-holiday quarters, the stock should not remain at 2x sales and around 15x earnings for long.
Grok Reading
The numbers describe a high-quality cash compounder that the market has re-rated as if growth has permanently broken. Annual revenue scaled from $1.20B in 2021 to $2.90B in 2025—a clean 25% CAGR—while operating income expanded from $125M to $589M and free cash flow reached $796M, a 27% FCF margin on a debt-free balance sheet holding $658M cash. Gross margin sits at 78.6% and operating margin at 20.4%; ROIC is 21.7%. At $13.49 and a $6.34B enterprise value near $5.7B, the stock trades at 15x trailing earnings, 2.0x EV/revenue, 8.4x EV/EBITDA and a roughly 12.5% FCF yield. Those are mature-industrial multiples attached to a still-growing, capital-light ad-tech platform. The story the raw data tell is not collapse; it is a sharp multiple compression that has outrun the actual deterioration in fundamentals.
What does stand out—and what the bullish valuation composites under-weight—is the recent deceleration. Q2 2026 revenue of $715M was only 3% above the year-earlier $694M; Q1 grew 12%. That is a material step-down from the mid-teens-to-20% pace that produced the 2025 annual print, and net margins compressed to 5.8–9% in the first half versus the mid-teens-to-20s seasonally normal in prior years. Earnings CAGR of 57% looks impressive in the rear-view, but recent earnings growth has slowed to low-double digits. The business remains highly profitable and cash-generative, yet the trajectory is no longer the high-growth SaaS story that once supported 40–50x earnings. The rule-based “mature earner” label fits the current run-rate better than the “high-growth” pre-flight tag.
The strongest case against an undervalued read is precisely that deceleration plus the structural bears. Privacy changes (ATT and cookie deprecation), agency in-housing of DSP capability, and the gravity of Google and Amazon’s closed ecosystems could permanently lower TTD’s take-rate and growth ceiling. If revenue growth settles in the mid-single digits and margins stay compressed, 15x earnings and 2x sales stop looking cheap and start looking fair-to-expensive for a cyclical ad platform. The narrative layer correctly flags that the stock is still pricing some re-acceleration that has not yet appeared in the quarterly prints; the Q2 3% print is the data point a skeptic would wave first. I weigh this less heavily than the models’ bear mass because the balance sheet is fortress-clean, FCF conversion remains excellent, and even a steady 8–12% grower with 20%+ ROIC and zero leverage is worth more than 8x EBITDA and a double-digit free-cash-flow yield. The market is already embedding a severe structural haircut; the incremental risk of further compression looks asymmetric.
What would flip the verdict is two consecutive quarters of re-acceleration back above 15% revenue growth with operating margins reclaiming the high teens, or conversely a full-year 2026 that prints sub-5% growth and further margin erosion. A credible competitive loss of CTV share or a material step-up in customer concentration risk would also force a downgrade. Until then the cash flows at this price dominate.
Big-3 Panel — where each AI stands
Advanced Analysis Forensic deep-dive · separate lenses
The Trade Desk is a genuinely high-quality operating business. Revenue compounded from $1.20B (2021) to $2.90B (2025), a ~25% CAGR, while operating margin expanded from 10.4% to 20.3% and net income grew from $138M to $443M. FCF stepped up every single year to $795.7M, cash conversion is outstanding (OCF/NI ~4x, accruals -8.2% of assets), and the balance sheet holds $1.30B liquid cash with zero net debt - survival risk is effectively nil. Beneish M at -2.8 and clean accruals give no signal of earnings manipulation.
Verify before trusting this (5)
- Customer concentration and take-rate trends in the 10-K given GM compression from 82.2% to 78.6%
- Segment/geographic breakout and CTV mix disclosures to gauge growth durability
- Detail on SBC grant structure and any post-2025 buyback authorization capacity
- Any pending litigation or Google/DOJ ad-tech spillover exposure
- Reconciliation of the two 2026-07-09 large A-Award grants to Olmstead (246K + 440K sh) - context in DEF 14A
The composite fair value of $25.74 and signal-adjusted $30.01 imply 90-120% upside from $13.49. Sanity-checking the components: the anchored-PE at $41.14 is almost certainly a runaway method that extrapolates prior multiples onto a business now digesting slower ad growth and heavy SBC - discount it. The DCF at $27.36 is the credible anchor and the EPV floor at $7.09 sets a genuine downside marker. Averaging the DCF with a haircut to the PE method (say $20-22 to reflect ~17% SBC leakage) still lands deserved value in the low-to-mid $20s - meaningfully above spot.
Verify before trusting this (4)
- Forward revenue guide and CTV mix trajectory in next print
- SBC as % of revenue and buyback pace - is per-share dilution actually offset
- Any commentary on agency in-housing DSPs and take-rate pressure
- One-time items in latest EBIT and whether margin expansion is sustaining
The tape is nominally risk-on, but that barely matters here because the pressure on TTD is idiosyncratic and severe. A Q2 miss, a 12% Q3 guide-down, C-suite churn, and a 22% single-day crash have flipped the narrative from 'best-in-class programmatic compounder' to 'structurally challenged fallen angel.' Analyst tone has broken the same way, with HSBC halving its price target and the stock making fresh 52-week lows down ~75% year-over-year. Momentum is technically 'positive' on longer windows, but the near-term price action is capitulatory. The active story is now Amazon/Google/AWS-WBD encroachment on the DSP layer plus privacy-driven moat erosion - exactly the kind of AI-disruption/big-tech-eats-you narrative that de-rates ad-tech multiples regardless of the DCF. Durability of the bear story is fragile (one clean quarter could re-rate it), but until then every incremental headline is being read through a bearish lens. Beta 1.04 means the calm macro helps only modestly, and macro ad-spend worry compounds the name-specific bleed.
Verify before trusting this (5)
- Whether Q3 print stabilizes or extends the guide-down - the single biggest sentiment pivot
- Analyst target-cut cadence - watch for the last downgrades that typically mark capitulation
- Any concrete rebuttal to the Amazon/Google/AWS competitive narrative from management
- Insider buying or a buyback acceleration as a sentiment signal
- Whether CTV/retail-media data points from peers (e.g., ROKU, MGNI) corroborate or refute macro ad-spend fear
The customer need — acquiring customers via paid media — is untouched. AI reaches TTD at the architecture layer: it collapses the cost of building bidding, forecasting and optimization logic, so the differentiated intelligence TTD sells becomes commoditized while the scarce assets migrate toward whoever owns premium inventory rights and first-party conversion signal — neither of which TTD owns. Offsetting that, AI makes media plans vastly more complex and more numerous, and a neutral routing layer with wide supply integrations is the natural execution substrate for advertiser agents; TTD's Kokai/Ventura/OpenPath push is an explicit attempt to sit where those agents transact. Its own P&L benefits regardless — 80% gross margin, opex-heavy, op margin already 10%→20% with FCF at $796M — but that only matters if take rate and spend share hold. This is a value-capture question, not a capability question, hence a deliberately wide range.
Verify before trusting this (8)
- Share of spend via curated SSP packages
- Ventura OS device/publisher adoption
- OpenPath direct-supply share of spend
- Kokai performance claims versus Amazon DSP
- Third-party ROAS benchmarking studies
- R&D spend per point of win-rate
- API/agent-originated spend disclosure
- MCP-style agent integrations shipped
This lens hasn't been run for this ticker yet.
When we made this prediction on Aug 13, 2026, TTD was $13.49. We expect it to be $19.40 by Feb 2027, and we consider it great value under $18.00. This is an early model (v0.6.0) — the direction is more reliable than the exact price. Made Aug 13, 2026.
Blue is our prediction, starting the day we made it. Grey is a slower route to the same place — the same destination, taking longer. Black is the actual price, so you can see how we are doing.