• Roku cut Q4 revenue guidance by $94 million.
• ROKU stock has slid 20% on the outlook.
• ROKU share price is trading at January 2019 level.

Roku (ROKU) stock appears ready to open on Thursday down a hefty 20%. The streaming company stock has sold off severely on the back of fourth-quarter guidance well below Wall Street's expectations. Management is now guiding for $800 million in Q4 revenue, while analysts had a consensus figure of $894 million. That latter consensus figure was already cut dramatically by about $300 million this year, so subsequent guidance below that level stunned the market. The share price of the pandemic favorite is now off 91% from its high of $490 back in July 2021.

Roku earnings results

For the third quarter, Roku delivered a GAAP earnings per share of $-0.88. This was much better than consensus of $-1.23 however. Revenue also outperformed earlier guidance, coming in at $761 million. That figure was about $68 million ahead of the forecast average. Revenue grew 12% YoY.

Costs for the company ballooned, however. The Q3 operating loss of $147 million was much worse than the $69 million operating profit from Q3 2021.

"Platform revenue was up 15% YoY to $670 million, representing 88% of total revenue," said CFO Steve Louden. "While platform revenue came in above our expectations and was a positive given the difficult macro environment, the advertising business continues to grow more slowly than our beginning of year forecast due to the current weakness in the overall TV ad market and the ad-scatter market in particular."

Louden has found a successor CFO and will be leaving Roku shortly.

Besides the worrisome lowered revenue guidance for Q4, management also said the fourth quarter loss could balloon to $-1.75, about 60 cents worse than earlier projections.

Roku added 2.3 million new accounts during the third quarter for a total of 65.4 million. Average Revenue Per User (ARPU), however, grew by just 15 cents to $44.25. This is much slower growth than shareholders had gotten used to. During the pandemic, ARPU rose as much as $12 YoY during some quarters.

Roku stock forecast

The 91% drop-off in Roku's share price is one of the worst performances of any large-cap stock during 2022's tyrannical bear market. Readers will remember that Roku stock actually peaked in July 2021 several months before many of its peers, which mostly peaked in November. By November of 2021, Roku stock had already reached oversold levels on the weekly Relative Strength Index (RSI).

Now with its share price in the low $40s, Roku is trading at this price level for the first time since January 2019. There is only one historical support level here, which can be seen on the weekly chart below. The $27 price level was the December 2018 low four years ago.

At this point, ROKU shares have been bouncing in and out of oversold levels for a year now, while the share price has continued to sink. At the moment ROKU is not even at oversold levels, because the RSI is "relative". There are no positives here. Despite Roku selling for two times the revenue, the chart leads us to believe that Roku will not bounce back anytime soon.

ROKU weekly chart