PayPal Is Down 78% and Has Been Falling for 4.3 Years

PayPal stock closed at $67.04 on its most recent trading day. Its all-time high was $308.53. That's a 78.3% drawdown that has now lasted 1,571 consecutive days, or roughly 4.3 years.

The Drawdown Severity Score of 17.2 places PayPal in the "Historic" category. To understand what that means: across all 398 assets we track, the average severity score is below 2. PayPal's is more than 8x that level.

How Does This Compare to PayPal's Own History?

PayPal has gone through 95 completed drawdown events since we started tracking it. The average drawdown lasted 22 days with a typical maximum drop of 4.0%. The current drawdown is not even in the same universe as any previous one.

Here's how the previous significant drops compare:

The biggest completed drawdown in PayPal's history was a 31.2% drop between February and May 2020 (the COVID crash), which lasted 75 days. The second worst was a 25.8% decline from February to July 2021, lasting 156 days.

The current drawdown is 2.5x deeper than the worst completed event and has lasted 21x longer than PayPal's average drawdown duration.

The Timeline in Context

The chart makes the situation visually clear. Every previous drawdown was a temporary dip that resolved relatively quickly. The current one is a structural collapse in valuation that began in late 2021 and has shown no sign of reversal.

What Changed

PayPal hit its all-time high of $308.53 in July 2021, during a period when fintech valuations were stretched across the board. Several factors have contributed to the extended decline:

Revenue growth decelerated. PayPal grew total payment volume from $936 billion in 2020 to $1.53 trillion in 2023, but the growth rate slowed from 31% to under 10% annually. Markets that priced in 30%+ growth repriced aggressively.

Competitive pressure intensified. Apple Pay, Google Pay, Stripe, Block (Square), and buy-now-pay-later services like Klarna and Affirm have all expanded into PayPal's core territory. The company no longer has the competitive moat it had in 2020.

Management pivoted from growth to profitability. Under new leadership, PayPal shifted focus to margin expansion and share buybacks. While this improved the balance sheet, it signaled to growth investors that the high-growth phase was over.

E-commerce growth normalized. The pandemic pulled forward years of e-commerce adoption. As growth reverted to trend, companies like PayPal that benefited disproportionately saw their valuations compress.

The Severity Score in Context

A severity score of 17.2 means the current drawdown is more than 17x what's typical for PayPal based on its historical volatility profile. To put that number in perspective across our full database:

• The median severity score across all 398 tracked assets is approximately 1.5
• Only about 10% of tracked assets currently have severity scores above 10
• PayPal's 17.2 ranks among the highest individual scores in our entire database

This doesn't predict whether PayPal will recover. Severity scores measure how unusual the current drawdown is relative to the stock's own history. A score this extreme tells you one thing with certainty: this has never happened before in PayPal's public market life.

What the Data Does and Doesn't Tell You

The data tells you that PayPal at $67.04 is trading at a 78.3% discount to its all-time high, that this drawdown has lasted 1,571 days, and that nothing in PayPal's previous 95 drawdown events comes close to this severity level.

What it doesn't tell you is whether the stock will recover, when, or to what level. Stocks that experience historic drawdowns sometimes recover to new highs (Apple dropped 33% in 2024-2025 and recovered within 10 months). Others settle into permanently lower valuations if the business has fundamentally changed.

The severity score is a measuring tool, not a crystal ball. But it does give you a precise, data-backed answer to the question: "Is PayPal's decline unusual?" The answer is unambiguously yes.

Other Stocks at Similar Severity Levels

PayPal isn't alone in the Historic severity tier. Several other stocks currently have severity scores above 10, placing them in similarly unprecedented territory:

TDOC/" class="text-primary hover:underline">Teladoc (severity 16.1) is down 97.5% for 1,738 days. ADBE/" class="text-primary hover:underline">Adobe (severity 9.1) is down 51.0% for 1,450 days. ASAN/" class="text-primary hover:underline">Asana (severity 15.3) is down 91.0% for 1,452 days. INTC/" class="text-primary hover:underline">Intel (severity 6.8) is down 39.0% for 1,674 days.

The common thread: all of these stocks peaked in 2021 or early 2022 and have been in sustained decline since. The pandemic-era repricing has been broad and deep, and severity scores quantify just how extreme each individual situation is relative to that stock's own history.