Square: stock rises by 190% in 2020

The price of Square’s stock has risen very much during the course of this 2020.

Square Inc is a company that has been listed on the New York Stock Exchange, NYSE, since 2015 under the symbol SQ.

The company was actually founded in 2009 by renowned Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and Jim McKelvey as a company to facilitate electronic payments. 

In 2015 it was listed on the NYSE with an initial price of around $12 per share. 

Until February 2017 the price remained below $15, but since then it has started to rise. In July 2018, it rose to $64, after which it briefly spiked to almost $100 in September 2018, before falling back to $56 in December. 

Since then it had fluctuated between $60 and $80 until mid-March 2020 when, due to the collapse of global financial markets, it fell to $38. 

It was the recovery from this collapse that caused Square’s share price to take off.

By the end of April, it had already risen to $65 and by the end of May, it was back up to $80. But this growth of 110% in two and a half months did not stop. 

June closed at $104 and July at $130. At the beginning of September, it reached $166 and then corrected slightly and went back up to $190 in mid-October. 

The absolute maximum peak was reached on November 6th, 2020 at $198 and then corrected to around $180. 

If we compare the minimum and the maximum price of the year, that is the $38 of March 20th and the $198 of November 6th, the growth has been of a stratospheric +421% in little less than eight months, while if we compare the current price with that of the beginning of the year the growth has been of 190%. 

In other words, starting at $62, the price has almost tripled in 2020. 

Square, stock growing unevenly

From March 21st, the growth was decidedly constant until the first of September, to the extent that it did not seem to be due to any specific news concerning the company. After all, the lockdown has greatly favoured e-commerce, and consequently also all actions dealing with online payments. 

But since September 2nd, growth has been less constant, with greater volatility of the price of the Square stock on the markets. 

In particular, from this date, there were two significant falls, followed by two sustained increases, with a final correction following the November 6th peak. 

This dynamic does not seem to have been affected by the news that the company has invested $50 million in bitcoin. 

Instead, this volatility in recent months seems to have followed the performance of the financial markets, particularly those of technology stocks, albeit with greater excursions. 

Although Square is not listed on the Nasdaq, the trend of its stock price since September has quite closely followed the trend of the Nasdaq 100 index, perhaps because both are linked to the world of online sales and dot coms. However, it should be noted that the S&P 500 index has also followed a similar trend. 

In other words, it does not appear that the remarkable performance of Square’s stock in 2020 is due specifically to the company’s activities, but is a consequence of the performance of the US financial markets, and in particular the technology sector as an indirect consequence of the pandemic.