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The Big Story: What’s The Forecast For The Trade Desk Stock?

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The sun hasn’t been shining on Wall Street this week as tech stocks dipped precipitously – The Trade Desk among them.

Despite turning in decent earnings, TTD’s stock dove by more than 25%, making it one of the most affected of the ad tech bunch.

It was a surprising development after more than a year of fair weather for ad tech. But now that a few clouds have started to gather, is the forecast still rosy for ad tech, both on the stock market and on the M&A front?

In this week’s episode, we contrast The Trade Desk’s strange nose dive with LUMA Partners CEO Terry Kawaja’s rosy column for AdExchanger in which he predicts the mother of all ad tech M&A booms.

But not everyone is waiting around for that to happen. We also discuss the trend of independent ad tech talent migrating to walled gardens. Although not a new phenomenon by any stretch, what does it mean that people in-the-know appear to be fleeing the open web on the eve of the end of third-party cookies?

Just wondering.

(P.S. Things move so quickly in tech that just a few hours after we recorded this episode, Antonio Garcia Martinez was already out at Apple.)

Also in this episode: Our editorial team’s analysis of the intro music on earnings calls and the “tells” we’ve learned as reporters about what an earning call’s vibe says about Wall Street/CEO relations.

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