Peloton shares climb as co-founder abruptly resigns

(Video Transcript)

A turbulent few months

Peloton Interactive Inc co-founder and chairman, John Foley, abruptly resigned from the company late last night.

The connected fitness business has seen a lot of disturbance among its board recently. Two executives have also gone at the same time, this biggest shakeup since Barry McCarthy arrived as chief executive back in February.

It's been a turbulent few months in which Peloton announced it was cutting around 10% of its workforce, about 800 jobs, ending in-house production, replacing its finance chief and partnering with Amazon to sell bikes and gear independently of its own website.

Peloton technical analysis

You can see here on this chart it rose pre-COVID from when it was down at 17.86, 857% all the way up this record high at $171 a share.

It originally came to the market at $29, but since that high point, we've seen profit warnings, concerns about the sales outlook, changes in staff and a big reduction in staff numbers, taking us all the way down to just $8 a share.

Now since then it has risen, it's currently trading at 1094, but Foley had already stepped down as chief executive in February, telling investors that he'd made missteps by growing the business too rapidly during the first year of COVID, where we saw this really big rise in its shares.

Since then, the company has hit $50 billion of market value, more than quadrupling its initial public market valuation in the late 2019's. However, this story has become one of failure and as a result of that we've now got a company which is trying to regroup itself.

It is up half of 1% today after gaining a small amount of trade last night all-sessions on IG's platform. We're awaiting the opening of the New York Stock Exchange in a short while.