The Trade Desk dropped 9% Monday after the ad-tech company missed Wall Street earnings expectations and issued Q2 guidance well below consensus. CTV ad spend held up but programmatic display weakness flagged a deeper concern about budget rotation away from open-web advertising. Last quarter the company also missed and the stock dropped 20%. Two strikes in a row for what was supposed to be a programmatic compounder.
The bigger question is whether AI-led ad platforms (Google, Meta, Amazon) are quietly compressing TTD's TAM. Hard to ignore that this used to be a beat-and-raise story.