Jim Cramer on Trade Desk: "Out of Left Field CFO Departure Equals Sell"

The Trade Desk, Inc. (NASDAQ:TTD) is one of the stocks Jim Cramer shed light on recently. Cramer noted the company’s CFO’s quick departure, as he stated:

The end of a very busy week for corporate earnings, I want to catch up on some of the biggest stories that we really didn’t have much chance to cover… I’m going to give you five bummers. First, sadly, because I really like these guys, there’s this Trade Desk. The advertising technology company has gone from a market darling just a few years ago to a chronic underperformer as these guys have struggled to adopt the new AI era. The Trade Desk was added to the S&P 500 last year, and then it ended last year as the worst performer in the index, down 68%.

Wall Street’s worried about these online advertising middlemen. They might not have much of a future in worlds where Meta Platforms can use AI to handle all their targeted advertising needs. You don’t really need to know what The Trade Desk does. And if you were hoping for a turnaround from The Trade Desk in 2026, you were sorely disappointed. The stock [is] already down another 20% for the year, including a 17% beat down this week, and this isn’t even an earnings story. The Trade Desk reports… full results in February. It’s something much worse.

On Monday, the company announced that it had fired its CFO after only five months on the job. At the same time, management reaffirmed their guidance for the fourth quarter. In a vacuum, that would be just fine, but Wall Street hates it when a CFO leaves out of nowhere, and this guy getting fired after only five months really does not inspire a lot of confidence. Makes you worry that something might be very wrong here. Yikes. Eventually, Trade Desk might become too cheap to ignore. At the moment, the stock’s selling for roughly 15 times this year’s earnings estimates, down from 62 times earnings at the beginning of last year. But nobody wants to stick their neck out and make that bet right now. Out of left field CFO departure equals sell.

The Trade Desk, Inc. (NASDAQ:TTD) provides a cloud-based platform that helps advertisers plan, manage, and measure digital ad campaigns across different formats and devices.

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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.