Lyft shares surge after company sees best week for rides since pandemic began

Yahoo Finance's Jared Blikre joined Yahoo Finance Live to discuss the company's updated guidance.

Video Transcript

- You can almost hear Lyft's CEO Logan Green saying, can I get an amen, please? Those shares traded higher on the earnings and guidance, right?

JARED BLIKRE: That's right. This was an unexpected preannouncement. They're going to be releasing their full earnings report in a month. But on this preannouncement, you can see Lyft shares up about $4.80 in after hours trading. And guess what?

They're seeing three straight months of average daily ride share ride growth. So some positive trends underway here. Now a couple more stats that they're releasing. They're seeing adjusted EBITDA loss of 135 million. That's less than the expected loss of 146 million.

So good news there for them. Not profitable yet, even on an adjusted EBITDA basis, but getting a little bit closer. They had previously seen a loss much greater of 145 million to 150 million. And here's another stat, they just came off their best week since March '20s, since March of last year.

That was of course in the heat of the pandemic sell off. And then in February, average daily ride share rides, those increased 4% month over month relative to the average daily ride to ride volume in January of 2021. So a nice Comp there. And then just doing a back of the envelope calculation for January and February, extrapolate into the entire quarter, they're expecting their first quarter ride to ride volume to be down 1.2% quarter over quarter.

Likely much better than expected. Again just looking at the stock here, up about 5%. And we also saw a movement briefly in Uber as well, kind of riding on the coattails of that move.

Here is a six month chart and guess what? We've been consolidating for a few weeks, mostly through the month of February and we just punched above it in the after hours market. Got to about $62. If we can do that, maybe get back to those highs of $88 that we saw on the very first day of trading.