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Shares of telemedicine pioneer giant Teladoc Health (TDOC -0.84%) slipped 1.9% through noon ET on Friday, giving back about half of the 4% the stock had gained in Thursday’s market rally.
This happened despite news that famed growth investor Cathie Wood continues to buy the stock and is even increasing the pace of her purchases.
As Cathie Wood’s ARK Innovation ETF (ARKK 0.23%) website attests, Wood has been buying Teladoc pretty steadily through the second half of this month. Indeed, no sooner had Teladoc stock fallen below $27 a share than ARK began buying — in nibbles at first, with fewer than 4,000 shares bought on Dec. 15, but lately in increasing volume.
Through Dec. 22, Wood’s funds had snapped up more than 109,182 shares of Teladoc. But even all that buying had no noticeable effect on the stock price, which continued to tumble all the way down below $23. Although her most recent purchase — nearly 200,000 shares bought for two separate funds yesterday — did appear to move the needle higher.
Then again, in one single day, that was twice the volume of purchasing Wood had done in the previous two weeks combined. You’d expect that to twitch the needle a bit.
The problem is that the twitch didn’t stick, and in the absence of support from Wood, Teladoc stock is falling once again today. Will that change in 2023?
I’m not so sure it will. Consider that over the past 12 months, Teladoc has reported massive losses on the basis of generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), despite generating $194 million in trailing free cash flow.
In 2023, however, analysts are forecasting that Teladoc’s free cash flow will slump as low as $133 million, and only return to 2022 levels a year later, in 2024.
If the best Teladoc shareholders can hope for over the next couple of years is free cash flow that just barely treads water — and continued GAAP losses on the income statement to boot — there’s probably not going to be a whole lot of investor interest in owning that kind of company, no matter how much stock Cathie Wood buys.
On the plus side, we probably won’t see another 74% decline in the stock, as we saw in 2022. That still doesn’t mean that 2023 will be a great year for Teladoc investors.
Rich Smith has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Teladoc Health. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
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