NerdWallet, Inc. (NRDS) valuation at a glance
NerdWallet, Inc. (NRDS) trades below the fair value estimate shown here. At $8.75 versus a $12.00 estimate, that is a 37% upside.
- Price
- $8.75
- Fair value estimate
- $12.00
- Upside
- +37%
- Market cap
- $576M
- P/S (TTM)
- 0.7×
CompaniesNRDS
Overview
NRDS
NerdWallet, Inc.
Communication ServicesMarketplacePersonal FinanceAI DisruptionSearch DependentBuybackDeep Value
$8.75-3.6%
Market Cap
$576M
SEC Form 10-K for fiscal 2025 (filed Feb 25 2026) and Form 10-Q for the quarter ended Mar 31 2026 (filed May 6 2026), cross-checked against SEC XBRL company facts and a yfinance harvest. US domestic filer, so 10-K, 10-Q, 8-K, DEF 14A and Form 4 are all available.
P/E (TTM)
9.4×
via financials
Rev Growth YoY
21.7%
+21.7%SEC filing
Gross Margin
93.0%
SEC filing
FCF Yield
21.3%
calculated
Upside to FV
+37.1%
vs fair value
Conviction
3/5A debt-free personal-finance marketplace generating $122.8M of trailing free cash flow against a $575.7M market capitalization, a 21.3% yield, on 93.0% gross margins and GAAP profitability. Revenue grew 21.7% in fiscal 2025 and operating income went from $9.4M to $65.2M. The catch is written into the expense line: performance marketing spend rose from $206.5M to $416.9M in two years while organic marketing spend FELL, because the company's chief executive says consumers 'turned to AI overviews and LLMs over traditional search'. Free traffic is being replaced by bought traffic, and the multiple has fallen from 19.9x EV/EBITDA to 4.0x while EBITDA more than doubled.
Research Depth
ScreeningDeep ResearchFull Model
Updated 1d ago
Quality Snowflake
Overall 80/100
Value5/5
Future2/2
Past4/4
Health4/4
Dividend0/1
Each axis scores the checks for which data is available (filled = pass, hollow = no data). Computed from the sourced metrics on this page, not a third-party rating.
Thesis
NerdWallet is a comparison marketplace for financial products, and the market is pricing it as though generative AI has already ended the search funnel it depends on. At $8.75 the market capitalization is $575.7M against $122.8M of trailing free cash flow, a 21.3% yield, and the enterprise value of about $534.4M is roughly 4.4 times that cash flow. Gross margin is 93.0%, the business is GAAP profitable with $68.9M of trailing net income, there is nothing drawn on the $125.0M revolving credit facility, and the company repurchased $216.3M of its own stock across fiscal 2024, fiscal 2025 and the first quarter of 2026 alone. On the surface this is a growing, profitable, debt-free business at four times cash flow. Now the part that explains the price, and it is not hidden in a footnote — it is the largest expense line in the company. Sales and marketing splits three ways, and the 10-K discloses each. Performance marketing, which is the cost of buying traffic, went from $206.5M in fiscal 2023 to $297.4M in fiscal 2024 to $416.9M in fiscal 2025. Over the same three years organic and other marketing, which is the content team that produces the free traffic, went from $110.6M to $104.6M to $102.7M. Performance marketing rose from 34.5% of revenue to 49.8% of revenue. Chief executive Tim Chen said the reason on the fiscal 2025 call: strength in performance marketing, direct and non-search referral channels 'more than offset organic search headwinds as consumers turned to AI overviews and LLMs over traditional search'. The company is not denying the disruption; it is buying its way through it. That is the whole investment question. Revenue still grew 21.7% in fiscal 2025, but growth decelerated to 6.2% in the first quarter of 2026, which came in below management's own $224-232M guidance range. Within that quarter consumer credit cards fell $12.5M and SMB revenue fell 15%, both attributed in the filing to organic search pressure, while deposit accounts rose $20.9M and personal loans rose $12.7M as partners expanded budgets. So the verticals where a user asks a question that an AI can answer are shrinking, and the verticals where a partner is buying distribution are growing. If bought traffic converts well enough to keep funding itself, this is a cash machine at four times cash flow. If the cost of buying traffic keeps rising faster than the revenue it produces, the margin structure inverts and the cash flow goes with it.
Bull Case
Cash GenerationTrailing free cash flow is $122.8M against a market capitalization of $575.7M, a 21.3% yield, and the company's own adjusted measure, which nets out the mortgage warehouse borrowing, was $117.8M for fiscal 2025 against $48.5M for fiscal 2024. The four-quarter ladder management publishes runs $48.5M, $57.6M, $70.6M, $85.5M and $117.8M, so the cash generation has more than doubled in five reported quarters.
Operating Leverage ArrivedGAAP operating income went from $3.6M in fiscal 2023 to $9.4M in fiscal 2024 to $65.2M in fiscal 2025, and reached $27.2M in the first quarter of 2026 alone against $0.7M in the comparable quarter. Research and development fell 19.2% to $66.7M and general and administrative fell 8.6% to $56.3M while revenue grew 21.7%. In the first quarter of 2026 sales and marketing actually FELL 7% year over year while revenue rose 6%, which is the first quarter where the marketing line stopped outrunning the top line.
Clean Balance SheetThere is no corporate debt. The $125.0M senior secured revolver with JPMorgan, which matures in September 2028 and can be upsized by a further $75.0M, had nothing drawn at either fiscal year end, with $124.5M available. The only borrowing on the balance sheet is a $14.9M draw on a $15.0M mortgage warehouse line, and that is matched by $15.2M of mortgage loans held for sale. Cash was $56.3M at the end of the first quarter of 2026 after a $66.0M buyback.
Buyback At ScaleThe company repurchased $20.0M of stock in fiscal 2023, $80.1M in fiscal 2024, $70.2M in fiscal 2025 and $66.0M in the first quarter of 2026, which is $236.3M in total and $216.3M in the last twenty-seven months against a market capitalization now under $600M. On February 20 2026 the board added $100.0M to the authorization, taking the aggregate to $225M. Shares outstanding fell from 71.3M at the end of fiscal 2025 to 65.8M, and diluted shares fell from 78.9M in fiscal 2024 to 69.5M in the first quarter of 2026. Two honest caveats sit against this. The shares closed fiscal 2023, 2024 and 2025 at $14.72, $13.30 and $13.55, so the great majority of that $236.3M was spent well above today's $8.75 and has not, so far, been good capital allocation on a mark-to-market basis. And the first-quarter repurchase consumed most of the cash balance, taking it from $98.3M to $56.3M.
Multiple Compression Against Rising EarningsEnterprise value to EBITDA has gone from 19.9 times at the fiscal 2023 year end to 15.9, then 7.8, and now 4.0. Over exactly the same span EBITDA rose from $51.8M to $135.2M, and price to sales fell from 1.89 to 0.68. The market is paying fewer absolute dollars for a business earning materially more. This is a re-rating of the durability of those earnings rather than a response to them falling, which is the bull case, but it should not be read as the market being simply wrong: the same period contains the doubling of performance marketing spend in the bear column, which is a real reason to pay less for the same dollar of cash flow.
The Mix Is Not All BadThe verticals under search pressure are shrinking, but the ones being funded by partner budgets are growing faster. In the fourth quarter of 2025 loans revenue rose 141% to $42.3M and emerging verticals, which is mostly banking, rose 57% to $52.9M, against credit cards down 24% and SMB down 12%. In the first quarter of 2026 deposit accounts added $20.9M and personal loans $12.7M. Consumer revenue as a whole still grew 10% in that quarter.
Bear Case
Buying The GrowthThis is the number that matters. Performance marketing spend went from $206.5M to $297.4M to $416.9M across fiscal 2023 to fiscal 2025, a 102% increase in two years, while revenue rose 39.6% over the same span. Performance marketing went from 34.5% of revenue to 49.8%. Meanwhile organic and other marketing, the content engine that produces free traffic, was cut from $110.6M to $102.7M. A business replacing free distribution with rented distribution has a structurally worse economic model than the one its history describes, and the rent is set by the same company whose AI answers are causing the problem.
Management Names The ThreatThe chief executive stated on the fiscal 2025 results that organic search headwinds arose 'as consumers turned to AI overviews and LLMs over traditional search', and the first quarter 2026 release attributes both the $12.5M decline in consumer credit cards and the 15% decline in SMB revenue to 'continued pressures in organic search traffic that have persisted for multiple quarters'. This is not a bear-case hypothesis. It is the company's own stated diagnosis, repeated across three consecutive reporting periods.
Growth Has SnappedRevenue grew 21.7% in fiscal 2025 but only 6.2% in the first quarter of 2026, and $222.2M came in BELOW management's own guidance range of $224-232M given ten weeks earlier. Guidance for fiscal 2026 adjusted EBITDA is $143-158M against $145.0M delivered in fiscal 2025, so management is guiding to roughly no growth in cash earnings after a year of 22% revenue growth. The single analyst publishing revenue estimates models about 6% growth for both 2026 and 2027.
One Customer Is A Quarter Of RevenueThe 10-K discloses that one customer accounted for 26% of revenue in fiscal 2025. In fiscal 2024 the top two were 22% and 11%, and in fiscal 2023 they were 13% and 11%. So a single financial-services partner has gone from roughly an eighth of revenue to more than a quarter in two years. Two customers were 16% and 11% of accounts receivable at the fiscal 2025 year end. A budget decision inside one partner can move this income statement by more than any operating initiative management can run.
A Ten Percent Owner Sold Into The LowTopline Capital Management sold 919,153 shares at $8.95 on June 26 2026, 587,835 at $9.22 on June 29 and 454,872 at $9.27 on June 30, taking its position from 5,251,145 shares to 3,289,285 in three consecutive trading days. That is 1,961,860 shares, about $17.9M, and a 37.4% cut to the holding, executed within a dollar of the fifty-two-week low. Across the recent Form 4 record there are no open-market insider purchases at all.
Revenue Is An EstimateRevenue is recognised when a consumer is matched with a partner, but for revenue-per-action and revenue-per-funded-loan arrangements the fee is not contractually earned until the card is issued or the loan funds. The 10-K states the transaction price is therefore variable and a constrained estimate is booked at match, with a contract asset carried inside prepaid expenses. Management applies judgement using historical approval rates. In a credit environment where approval rates fall, revenue recognised today can be revised, and the estimate sits inside a line item most readers never open.
Key Metrics
Market Cap
$576M
SEC Form 10-K for fiscal 2025 (filed Feb 25 2026) and Form 10-Q for the quarter ended Mar 31 2026 (filed May 6 2026), cross-checked against SEC XBRL company facts and a yfinance harvest. US domestic filer, so 10-K, 10-Q, 8-K, DEF 14A and Form 4 are all available.
Enterprise Value
$534M
calculated
Revenue (TTM)
$850M
SEC filing
P/E (TTM)
9.4×
via financials
Forward P/E
–
consensus
P/S (TTM)
0.7×
via financials
P/B
1.7×
via financials
EV/EBITDA
4.0×
calculated
PEG
–
calculated
Revenue Growth
21.7%
SEC filing
Gross Margin
93.0%
SEC filing
Operating Margin
10.8%
SEC filing
Net Margin
8.1%
SEC filing
Free Cash Flow
$123M
SEC filing
FCF Yield
21.3%
calculated
Debt / Equity
0.0×
SEC filing
Current Ratio
2.6×
SEC filing
Short Interest
13.4%
exchange
Institutional Own.
–
13F
Insider Own.
5.5%
proxy
Shares Out.
65.8M
SEC filing
Float
32.0M
exchange
Valuation
Price vs Fair Value
Bear$5.50
Base$12.00
Bull$16.00
Now $8.75
Bear Case
$5.50
The substitution fails. Organic traffic keeps decaying, bought traffic has to be bid up to replace it, and the marketing line resumes outrunning revenue. Adjusted EBITDA falls back toward $100M and free cash flow toward $70M as the working capital tailwind reverses. A shrinking, partner-concentrated, search-dependent marketplace earns about 3x EV/EBITDA, roughly $300M of enterprise value, plus about $60M of cash, so around $360M of equity on roughly 65M shares, near $5.50. Below the published analyst low of $9.00. Probability ~30%.
Base Case
$12.00
Management's fiscal 2026 guidance holds: GAAP operating income of $72-89M and adjusted EBITDA of $143-158M, with revenue growing in the mid single digits as partner-funded verticals offset the search-exposed ones. Free cash flow holds near $115M. The market pays about 6x free cash flow for a business that is profitable but no longer compounding, roughly $700M of enterprise value, plus cash, giving roughly $760M of equity across about 64M shares after continued buybacks, close to $11.90. That is the analyst mean and median of $12.00 from five analysts. Probability ~45%.
Bull Case
$16.00
The vertical-integration strategy works. Direct, app and non-search channels carry a growing share of traffic, performance marketing efficiency improves rather than degrades, and the buyback keeps retiring stock at these levels. Free cash flow holds above $130M and the market re-rates a debt-free, cash-generative marketplace to about 9x, roughly $1.17B of enterprise value plus cash, about $1.23B of equity on roughly 62M shares after buybacks, near $19.80, tempered to $16.00 for the concentration and disclosure risks that do not go away in any scenario. Just above the $15.00 analyst high. Probability ~25%.
DCF Summary
DCF awaiting Phase 2+
Discounted cash-flow model is built once research reaches the deep-research stage.
Historical Multiples
| Year | P/E | P/S | EV/EBITDA |
|---|---|---|---|
| FY23 | – | 1.9× | 19.9× |
| FY24 | 32.2× | 1.4× | 15.8× |
| FY25 | 19.8× | 1.1× | 7.8× |
| TTM · | 9.4× | 0.7× | 4.0× |
Current multiple highlighted vs trailing history.
Peer Comparison
| Ticker | Mkt Cap | P/E | P/S | EV/EBITDA | Rev Growth | Gross Mgn | Net Mgn |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NRDS | $0.58B | 9.4× | 0.7× | 4.0× | +21.7% | 93.0% | 8.1% |
| TREE | $0.46B | 2.5× | 0.4× | 6.1× | +25.3% | 96.4% | 14.3% |
| EVER | $0.84B | 7.6× | 1.2× | 8.5× | +24.6% | 97.5% | 15.3% |
| YELP | $1.39B | 10.0× | 0.9× | 5.8× | +0.8% | 90.0% | 9.5% |
| QNST | $0.88B | 13.4× | 0.7× | 19.9× | +28.3% | 10.5% | 5.5% |
| ZD | $1.90B | 42.0× | 1.4× | 6.0× | -1.9% | 85.3% | 3.3% |
Financials
| Line Item | FY2024 | FY2025 | YoY |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total Revenue Consumer $736.6M + SMB $100.0M. SMB fell from $109.8M. | $687.6M | $836.6M | +21.7% |
| Cost of Revenue Platform delivery only. Content cost sits in marketing below. | $63.5M | $63.7M | +0.3% |
| Gross Profit Gross margin about 92% | $624.1M | $772.9M | +23.8% |
| — Performance Marketing The cost of buying traffic. Was $206.5M in FY2023, so up 102% in two years, and now 49.8% of revenue against 34.5% in FY2023. | $297.4M | $416.9M | +40.2% |
| — Brand Marketing | $68.6M | $65.1M | -5.1% |
| — Organic & Other Marketing The content engine that produces free traffic. Was $110.6M in FY2023, so cut while paid spend doubled. | $104.6M | $102.7M | -1.8% |
| Total Sales & Marketing 69.9% of revenue | $470.6M | $584.7M | +24.2% |
| Research & Development | $82.5M | $66.7M | -19.2% |
| General & Administrative | $61.6M | $56.3M | -8.6% |
| Operating Income GAAP. Was $3.6M in FY2023. | $9.4M | $65.2M | +593.6% |
| Income Tax Provision (Benefit) The FY2024 benefit is why FY2024 net income looks strong against a $9.4M operating result. Do not read the two years as comparable. | ($25.4M) | $19.5M | – |
| Net Income | $30.4M | $48.7M | +60.2% |
| Diluted EPS | $0.38 | $0.64 | +68.4% |
| Diluted Average Shares 69.5M by Q1 2026 after the $66.0M repurchase | 78.9M | 75.9M | -3.8% |
| Item | Mar 31 2026 | Dec 31 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| Cash & Equivalents The $42.0M decline is the $66.0M buyback plus the $16.9M acquisition, not operating burn | $56.3M | $98.3M |
| Accounts Receivable, net | $113.1M | $111.0M |
| Mortgage Loans Held For Sale Matched by the warehouse borrowing below. Not free corporate liquidity. | $15.2M | $7.1M |
| Total Current Assets | $206.4M | $244.7M |
| Goodwill Rose on the College Finance acquisition, Feb 20 2026 | $136.3M | $123.5M |
| Total Assets | $432.0M | $461.1M |
| Warehouse Borrowings Inside accrued expenses. Secured by the mortgage notes, matched by the asset above. | $14.9M | $6.9M |
| Revolving Credit Facility Drawn $125.0M available, $124.5M undrawn net of letters of credit, matures Sept 2028 | $0.0M | $0.0M |
| Total Current Liabilities | $80.3M | $70.9M |
| Total Liabilities | $95.8M | $86.6M |
| Stockholders' Equity Fell on the buyback, not on losses | $336.2M | $374.5M |
| Component | FY2023 | FY2024 | FY2025 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Operating Cash Flow | $72.1M | $71.8M | $131.6M |
| Capitalized Software Development Falling every year, which flatters free cash flow and is worth watching | ($28.8M) | ($20.7M) | ($16.9M) |
| Purchases of Property & Equipment Asset-light: capex is under 0.2% of revenue | ($0.7M) | ($0.6M) | ($1.3M) |
| Free Cash Flow Trailing figure is $122.8M against an enterprise value of $534.4M, about 4.4x | $42.6M | $50.5M | $113.4M |
| Net Warehouse Borrowing Added back in the company's adjusted measure since it funds saleable mortgages | $0.0M | ($2.0M) | $4.4M |
| Adjusted Free Cash Flow (company definition) Management's published TTM ladder: $48.5M, $57.6M, $70.6M, $85.5M, $117.8M | $42.6M | $48.5M | $117.8M |
| Share Repurchases A further $66.0M in Q1 2026, so $236.3M in total | ($20.0M) | ($80.1M) | ($70.2M) |
| Stock-Based Compensation Down 26% over two years, unusual for a company this size | $38.8M | $37.7M | $28.6M |
Source: SEC Form 10-K for fiscal 2025 filed February 25 2026 and Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31 2026 filed May 6 2026, cross-checked line by line against SEC XBRL company facts. Two things on this balance sheet are easy to read wrongly and both are flagged in the tables below. First, the mortgage warehouse line. NerdWallet's lending subsidiary carries $14.9M of short-term warehouse borrowings inside accrued expenses, funding $15.2M of mortgage loans held for sale. The two offset, neither is corporate leverage, and the company's own adjusted free-cash-flow measure explicitly adds back the net warehouse borrowing for exactly this reason. Second, the share count. NerdWallet has dual-class stock, 34,113,131 Class A and 31,685,652 Class B, and several data feeds report only the Class A figure. Using 34.1M rather than the true 65.8M would halve the market capitalization and double every per-share figure on this page. Gross margin is shown at 93.0% but should be read with care: cost of revenue is only the platform delivery cost, while the content that constitutes the actual product sits in sales and marketing under organic marketing. The three-way marketing split in the income statement below is the single most important disclosure on this company.
Catalysts
Aug 7 '26
Earningshigh relevance
Second quarter 2026 results
Reporting the day after this page was built, so treat every figure here as pre-print. The consensus published through yfinance is about $198.5M of revenue and $0.20 of earnings per share, against $186.9M in the comparable quarter, but that estimate carries a single contributing analyst and its own high and low are internally inconsistent, so it is a weak anchor. The three things that decide the thesis are whether revenue growth holds above the 6.2% of the first quarter, whether performance marketing spend falls again as a share of revenue as it did in the first quarter, and whether management repeats the organic-search language again, having already described those pressures as having persisted for multiple quarters.
2026-27
Strategyhigh relevance
Vertical integration and non-search channels
Management has said the plan is to accelerate vertical integration and build durable direct relationships so that NerdWallet becomes, in the chief executive's phrase, a no-brainer destination for shopping financial products. The College Finance acquisition in February 2026 and the earlier move into mortgage and insurance broking are that strategy taking balance-sheet form. Watch for disclosure that direct and app traffic is growing as a share of the mix, which is the only durable answer to the search problem.
2026-27
Capital Returnhigh relevance
The $225M buyback authorization
The board added $100.0M to the repurchase authorization on February 20 2026, taking the aggregate to $225M against a market capitalization now under $600M. The company then spent $66.0M in the first quarter alone, its largest quarterly repurchase ever, cutting diluted shares to 69.5M. At these prices continued repurchase is unusually accretive, but it also consumed most of the cash balance. A step-up would signal management sees the disconnect; a pause would suggest they want the cash for acquisitions or defence.
2026-27
Risk
Partner concentration disclosure in the next 10-K
One customer was 26% of revenue in fiscal 2025, up from a top-two of 13% and 11% in fiscal 2023. The next annual report will show whether that concentration kept climbing. This is the fastest route to a large negative revision that has nothing to do with AI, and it is disclosed only once a year.
Ongoing
Industryhigh relevance
Google AI Overviews and LLM answer coverage
The mechanism driving the de-rating sits outside the company entirely. Every expansion of AI Overviews into commercial financial queries, and every improvement in assistants answering 'which credit card should I get', removes a click that NerdWallet used to receive for free. This is not a dated event but a continuous variable, which is precisely why the market is unwilling to pay a normal multiple for the cash flow.
Ongoing
Macro
Partner marketing budgets and the credit cycle
The offsetting force in fiscal 2025 was financial partners expanding budgets, particularly in deposits, personal loans and auto insurance. That is a cyclical variable tied to rates, deposit competition and credit appetite. A tightening in partner budgets would hit the growing verticals at the same time the search-exposed verticals are shrinking, which is the scenario in which both halves of the mix fail together.
Risks
| Risk | Category | Severity | Probability | Impact on Thesis |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Performance marketing spend rose from $206.5M in fiscal 2023 to $416.9M in fiscal 2025, from 34.5% of revenue to 49.8%, while organic and other marketing was cut from $110.6M to $102.7M. | Business Model | High | Certain | The company is substituting rented distribution for owned distribution. Bought traffic has to be re-bought every period at a price set by an auction, and the auctioneer is the same platform whose AI answers are removing the free traffic. This is disclosed, not alleged, and it is the reason a 21% free-cash-flow yield exists. |
| In the fiscal 2025 results the chief executive attributed organic search headwinds to consumers turning to AI overviews and large language models. Subsequent releases attribute continued declines to organic search pressure without repeating the AI language, and the first quarter of 2026 states those pressures have persisted for multiple quarters. | Disruption | High | High | Comparison content for financial products is close to the ideal case for an AI answer: a factual, structured, frequently-updated comparison that a model can synthesise directly. The precise wording matters for how much weight to put on it. Management named AI explicitly once and has since described the symptom rather than restating the cause, so the persistence of the traffic decline is disclosed and continuing while the attribution to AI specifically rests on that one statement plus the observable behaviour of search results. |
| Tim Chen, co-founder, chief executive and chairman, together with his affiliated trusts holds all 31,685,652 Class B shares, which carry ten votes each against one vote for Class A, giving him approximately 89% of total voting power as of December 31 2025. | Governance | Medium | Certain | Buying this stock buys economics, not influence. Class A holders collectively control roughly a tenth of the vote, and Class B retains majority control for as long as it represents at least 9.1% of shares outstanding. There is no mechanism by which outside holders can force a sale, change the board or redirect capital allocation, and the buyback that is currently supporting the shares is entirely at the discretion of a board the founder controls. The counterweight is that his economic interest is large and undiversified, so his incentives on price are broadly aligned even where his control is not accountable. |
| One customer accounted for 26% of revenue in fiscal 2025, against a top-two of 22% and 11% in fiscal 2024 and 13% and 11% in fiscal 2023. | Concentration | High | Certain | More than a quarter of revenue now depends on the marketing budget decisions of a single financial-services partner, and that dependence has roughly doubled in two years. A partner pulling back for reasons entirely internal to itself would produce a revenue shock that no operating improvement could offset, and the disclosure appears only annually. |
| Revenue for revenue-per-action and revenue-per-funded-loan arrangements is recognised at match as a constrained estimate of variable consideration, with a contract asset carried in prepaid expenses and management applying judgement based on historical approval rates. | Revenue Quality | Medium | Medium | Reported revenue leads the cash it represents and depends on partner approval rates staying near their historical range. In a credit tightening, approval rates fall, the constraint has to be revised, and revenue can be revised downward for reasons that have nothing to do with traffic. This is standard for the model but it is an estimate, not a receipt. |
| Growth decelerated from 21.7% for fiscal 2025 to 6.2% in the first quarter of 2026, and the $222.2M reported was below management's own guidance range of $224-232M. Fiscal 2026 adjusted EBITDA is guided to $143-158M against $145.0M delivered in fiscal 2025. | Growth | Medium | Certain | Management is guiding to approximately no growth in cash earnings after a year of 22% revenue growth, and has already missed its own revenue guide once. The base case here depends on that flat guidance being met rather than beaten, and the first data point on the year went the wrong way. |
| Topline Capital Management, a ten percent holder, sold 1,961,860 shares across June 26, 29 and 30 2026 at prices between $8.95 and $9.27, cutting its position by 37.4% to 3,289,285 shares. There are no open-market insider purchases in the recent Form 4 record. | Ownership | Medium | Certain | A large holder with a research position chose to sell nearly two million shares within a dollar of the fifty-two-week low rather than add. That is not proof the thesis is wrong, but it is the best-informed selling visible in the public record, and nobody on the inside was buying against it. |
Technical Snapshot
52-Week Range
$7.33$8.75$16.24
RSI (14)
41
neutral
50-Day MA
$8.89
-1.6%below
200-Day MA
$11.03
-20.7%below
Avg Vol (30d)
0.9M
-58%vs average
Support Levels
$7.75$7.58$7.33
Resistance Levels
$9.61$11.27$11.63
Price path reconstructed from the 52-week range, current price, and 50/200-day moving averages. Connect a live market-data feed for production.
Ownership & Insider Activity
Top Institutional Holders via 13F filings
13F holdings pending
Institutional holder detail awaiting filing.
Insider Activity
The ownership record on NerdWallet is unusually informative because it is a US domestic filer, so Form 4 exists and can be read directly rather than inferred. What it shows is one-directional. Topline Capital Management and its affiliated partnership sold 919,153 shares at $8.95 on June 26 2026, 587,835 at $9.22 on June 29 and 454,872 at $9.27 on June 30, moving from 5,251,145 shares to 3,289,285 across three consecutive trading days. That is 1,961,860 shares for roughly $17.9M and a 37.4% reduction, executed within about a dollar of the fifty-two-week low of $7.33. Across the recent Form 4 record parsed for this page there are no open-market purchases by insiders at all, only sales and routine grant, vest and tax-withholding events which are excluded here as uninformative. Insiders are reported at about 5.5% of the 65.8M shares outstanding, but that economic figure understates control by an order of magnitude. The 10-K states that co-founder, chief executive and chairman Tim Chen and his affiliated trusts hold all outstanding Class B shares, which carry ten votes each, and that this constituted approximately 89% of total voting power at December 31 2025. Class B keeps majority control for as long as it represents at least 9.1% of shares outstanding. A buyer of Class A here is buying the cash flow and roughly a tenth of the vote. The institutional-ownership percentage is not published on this page: the yfinance field for it is unreliable across this dataset, and on a dual-class issuer where feeds frequently report only the 34.1M Class A count rather than the full 65.8M, an ownership percentage computed against the wrong denominator would be close to double the truth. What the balance sheet says about ownership economics is firmer than any feed. The company repurchased $20.0M, $80.1M and $70.2M of stock in fiscal 2023, 2024 and 2025, then $66.0M in the first quarter of 2026, which is $236.3M against a market capitalization now below $600M. Shares outstanding fell from 71.3M at the fiscal 2025 year end to 65.8M, and the board raised the remaining authorization to $225M in February 2026. So the company has been the largest buyer of its own stock while its largest outside holder has been the largest seller.
| Name | Title | Action | Shares | Price | Date | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Topline Capital Management, Llc | Insider | Sell | 919.2K | $8.95 | 2026-06-26 | $8.23M |
| Topline Capital Management, Llc | Insider | Sell | 587.8K | $9.22 | 2026-06-29 | $5.42M |
| Topline Capital Management, Llc | Insider | Sell | 454.9K | $9.27 | 2026-06-30 | $4.22M |
| Topline Capital Partners, Lp | 10% Owner | Sell | 919.2K | $8.95 | 2026-06-26 | $8.23M |
| Topline Capital Partners, Lp | 10% Owner | Sell | 587.8K | $9.22 | 2026-06-29 | $5.42M |
| Topline Capital Partners, Lp | 10% Owner | Sell | 454.9K | $9.27 | 2026-06-30 | $4.22M |
Peer Comparison
| Ticker | Mkt Cap | P/E | P/S | EV/EBITDA | Rev Growth | Gross Mgn | Net Mgn |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NRDS | $0.58B | 9.4× | 0.7× | 4.0× | +21.7% | 93.0% | 8.1% |
| TREE | $0.46B | 2.5× | 0.4× | 6.1× | +25.3% | 96.4% | 14.3% |
| EVER | $0.84B | 7.6× | 1.2× | 8.5× | +24.6% | 97.5% | 15.3% |
| YELP | $1.39B | 10.0× | 0.9× | 5.8× | +0.8% | 90.0% | 9.5% |
| QNST | $0.88B | 13.4× | 0.7× | 19.9× | +28.3% | 10.5% | 5.5% |
| ZD | $1.90B | 42.0× | 1.4× | 6.0× | -1.9% | 85.3% | 3.3% |
Recognizable sector comparables. Multiples are trailing-twelve-month figures from market and exchange data; lowest multiple in each column highlighted. Loss-making peers show no P/E.
Research Notes
2026-08-06Internal (40-agent DeepSeek pass via OpenRouter + yfinance ground truth + 10-K/10-Q verification)
DEEP INTEL: NRDS, watching a company buy back the traffic it used to get free
Built from a 40-agent qualitative pass costing $0.029 in total, with every number then verified against the fiscal 2025 10-K, the first-quarter 2026 10-Q, SEC XBRL company facts and a yfinance harvest. The model contributed no figures by design and was told in every prompt that any number it emitted would be deleted. Its useful contributions were three: it flagged partner concentration as the thing to check, which turned out to be 26% of revenue in one customer; it flagged that revenue recognised on a variable, constrained estimate is not the same as revenue collected, which the 10-K confirms; and it asked whether marketing costs were being capitalised, which sent me to the note confirming advertising of $486.4M is expensed as incurred. Setup: $122.8M of trailing free cash flow against a $575.7M market capitalization, no corporate debt, 93.0% gross margins, and a marketing line that shows the company substituting paid traffic for the organic traffic AI is taking. Conviction 3/5.
2026-02-25NerdWallet FY2025 Form 10-K, sales and marketing note
The three-line table that explains the whole stock
The 10-K breaks sales and marketing into three components and the trend in them is the investment case, in either direction. Performance marketing, which is primarily the cost of driving traffic directly to the platform, was $206.5M in 2023, $297.4M in 2024 and $416.9M in 2025. Brand marketing went the other way, $84.4M, $68.6M, $65.1M. Organic and other marketing, which is primarily personnel cost for the content and marketing teams, went $110.6M, $104.6M, $102.7M. Total sales and marketing was $401.5M, $470.6M and $584.7M. Advertising expense, which includes performance and brand marketing plus certain external organic costs, totalled $294.7M, $370.3M and $486.4M and is expensed as incurred rather than capitalised. Set the performance line against revenue of $599.4M, $687.6M and $836.6M and the ratio moves from 34.5% to 43.3% to 49.8%. Revenue grew 39.6% over those two years; the cost of buying the traffic behind it grew 102%.
2026-02-25NerdWallet Q4 and FY2025 results, chief executive statement
Management says the quiet part on the record
Chief executive Tim Chen, in the fiscal 2025 release: 'Strength in performance marketing, direct, and non-search referral channels more than offset organic search headwinds as consumers turned to AI overviews and LLMs over traditional search.' The same release reports fourth-quarter credit cards revenue of $26.5M, down 24% year over year, and SMB products revenue of $22.5M, down 12%, both attributed to continued headwinds in organic search traffic, against loans revenue up 141% to $42.3M and emerging verticals up 57% to $52.9M as partners expanded budgets. Full-year revenue was $836.6M, up 22%, with GAAP operating income of $65.2M against $9.4M. The candour is worth something. A company that names the mechanism disassembling its own funnel, in its own results release, is easier to underwrite than one that attributes the same decline to a temporary algorithm update.
2026-05-06NerdWallet Q1 2026 results and Form 10-Q
The first guidance miss, and what grew anyway
First-quarter 2026 revenue was $222.2M, up 6% year over year, against management's own guidance of $224-232M issued ten weeks earlier. Underneath it: consumer revenue of $197.6M rose 10%, driven by a $20.9M increase from deposit accounts and $12.7M from personal loans as partners expanded budgets, partially offset by a $12.5M decrease in consumer credit cards attributed to 'continued pressures in organic search traffic that have persisted for multiple quarters'. SMB revenue of $24.6M fell 15% for the same stated reason. GAAP income from operations was $27.2M against $0.7M, net income $20.4M against $0.2M, and adjusted EBITDA $45.2M against $21.1M. The reason profit exploded while revenue crawled is on the expense side: sales and marketing FELL 7% to $149.1M while revenue rose 6%, the first quarter in this sequence where the marketing line did not outrun the top line. Cash fell from $98.3M to $56.3M, but that is the $66.0M share repurchase and the $16.9M College Finance acquisition, not operating burn.
2026-05-06NerdWallet Q1 2026 Form 10-Q, notes 3, 4, 5 and 7
Two things on this balance sheet that will fool a screener
The first is the mortgage warehouse. NerdWallet's lending subsidiary maintains a $15.0M warehouse line of credit, extendable to $18.75M for up to 90 days, bearing interest at the rate of the underlying mortgages subject to a 5.25% floor and maturing February 1 2027. It had $14.9M outstanding at March 31 2026 against $6.9M at December 31 2025, recorded inside accrued expenses rather than as debt, and it funds $15.2M of mortgage loans held for sale carried at fair value. The two offset almost exactly. Neither is corporate leverage, and the company's own adjusted free-cash-flow definition adds back the net warehouse borrowing for precisely this reason. The corporate revolver, a $125.0M senior secured facility with JPMorgan maturing September 2028, had nothing drawn at either fiscal year end. The second trap is the share count. There are 34,113,131 Class A shares and 31,685,652 Class B, so 65,798,783 in total, and several data feeds publish only the Class A number. At $8.75 the correct market capitalization is $575.7M; using the Class A count alone would produce $298.5M and make every valuation ratio on this page look roughly twice as attractive as it is. Also in the quarter: the February 20 2026 acquisition of College Finance Company, a student loan marketplace, for $17.2M of consideration of which $16.9M was cash.
2026-06-30NerdWallet Form 4 filings, SEC EDGAR
The best-informed seller in the record
Topline Capital Management and Topline Capital Partners, reporting as a ten percent owner, sold on three consecutive trading days at the end of June 2026: 919,153 shares at $8.95 on June 26, 587,835 at $9.22 on June 29, and 454,872 at $9.27 on June 30. Shares held following each transaction were 4,331,992, then 3,744,157, then 3,289,285, against 5,251,145 before the sequence began. That is 1,961,860 shares for approximately $17.9M and a 37.4% reduction in the position, executed roughly $1.50 above the fifty-two-week low of $7.33 and about 43% below the fifty-two-week high. The parsed Form 4 record contains no open-market insider purchases over the same window. Set against that, the company itself repurchased $66.0M of stock during the first quarter of 2026, its largest quarterly buyback on record. The issuer and its largest reporting outside holder are taking opposite sides of the same disagreement, which is a reasonable summary of why the multiple is where it is.
2026-08-06yfinance and SEC XBRL (computed, USD)
What the market is paying, and one number this page refuses to print
At the August 6 2026 close of $8.75 the market capitalization on 65,798,783 shares is $575.7M. Cash was $56.3M at March 31 2026 with nothing drawn on the corporate revolver, so enterprise value is about $534.4M taking the $14.9M warehouse borrowing at face value, or about $519M if the matching mortgage loans held for sale are netted against it. Trailing twelve-month revenue is $849.6M, net income $68.9M, operating income $91.7M and free cash flow $122.8M, so the market is paying roughly 4.4 times trailing free cash flow for the operating business and the free-cash-flow yield on the market capitalization is 21.3%. Trailing price to earnings is 9.4 on trailing diluted earnings of $0.93. The shares are 46.1% below the $16.24 fifty-two-week high, with the 200-day moving average at $11.03 and short interest at 13.4% of the Class A float. Five analysts publish price targets with a mean and median of $12.00, a low of $9.00 and a high of $15.00. This page deliberately does not publish a forward price-to-earnings ratio. The widely-syndicated figure of about 4.3 times is computed against a fiscal 2027 earnings estimate carrying a single contributing analyst, and that estimate appears to be a non-GAAP number being divided into a GAAP share price. Management's own fiscal 2026 guidance of $72-89M in GAAP operating income implies GAAP earnings per share somewhere near $0.82 to $1.01, which is a forward multiple closer to 9 or 10 times than to 4. Publishing the low number would have made this page look twice as cheap as the company's own guidance supports.
NerdWallet, Inc. valuation questions
Is NerdWallet, Inc. (NRDS) stock undervalued?
Against the fair value estimate shown on this page, NerdWallet, Inc. trades below: $8.75 today versus a $12.00 estimate, about +37%. The methodology and per-scenario sources are set out in the Valuation section. Treat it as research, not advice, and do your own homework.
What is NerdWallet, Inc.'s fair value?
The fair value estimate shown for NRDS is $12.00. Its valuation scenarios span bear $5.50, base $12.00, bull $16.00. See the Valuation section for the basis of each.
What is NerdWallet, Inc.'s market cap?
NerdWallet, Inc. (NRDS) has a market capitalization (its market value, often searched as "net worth") of $576M, and an enterprise value of $534M.
What is the bull and bear case for NRDS?
Valuation scenarios: bull $16.00, base $12.00, bear $5.50. Each reflects a distinct set of assumptions; the drivers and sources are detailed in the Valuation section above.