Shares of Bitcoin miner Marathon Digital Holdings (MARA) are up in today’s trading as investors await its Q3 earnings results on November 12 after the market closes. Analysts are expecting earnings per share to come in at -$0.33 on revenue of $141.04 million. This equates to a 186.8% decrease for the former but a 44.1% year-over-year increase for the latter, according to TipRanks’ data.
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It’s worth noting that MARA has had a mixed track record when it comes to beating earnings. In fact, it has only exceeded estimates four times during the past eight quarters.
Improving Production Figures
Although EPS is expected to fall, the company did recently provide a positive Bitcoin production update. In fact, Marathon produced 717 bitcoins in October, which was up 2% from the previous month and the best month since the April Halving (an event that reduced the reward for mining Bitcoin).
In addition, the firm saw a 14% month-over-month increase in its energized hash rate (the number of calculations a miner can perform per second) to 40.2 EH/s. Marathon aims to reach a hash rate of 50 EH/s by the end of the year by upgrading its sites with new miners and by improving the infrastructure.
The company now holds 27,562 BTC, which is worth roughly $2.2 billion at the time of writing. This is also the reason why earnings are expected to drop and become negative – Marathon has decided to hold onto more of its Bitcoins rather than selling them into the open market, therefore preventing them from officially realizing any net income.
Is MARA a Good Stock to Buy?
Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Moderate Buy consensus rating on MARA stock based on three Buys, one Hold, and one Sell assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. After a 110% rally in its share price over the past year, the average MARA price target of $21 per share implies 9.1% upside potential.
