Pinterest (PINS) Stock Outlook, December 5, 2025: S&P MidCap 400 Inclusion, Analyst Targets and the AI Shopping Bet

Updated: December 6, 2025

Pinterest, Inc. (NYSE: PINS) is back in focus after a volatile November, with fresh index news, heavy institutional activity and a still‑bullish Wall Street consensus all shaping the stock’s outlook as of December 5, 2025.

On Friday, December 5, Pinterest shares closed at roughly $26.8, down about 1.7% on the day, leaving the stock near the lower end of its recent range and well below its 52‑week high around $41. ^[1]

At the same time, S&P Dow Jones Indices has just confirmed that Pinterest will join the S&P MidCap 400 index on December 22, a move that should trigger mechanical buying from index funds and ETFs. ^[2]

Below is a deep dive into the latest news, forecasts and analysis around Pinterest stock as of December 5, 2025.

Key takeaways for Pinterest (PINS) investors

Share price & performance: PINS closed near $26.8 on December 5, down about 1.7% on the day, and is down roughly 9% year‑to‑date and about 17% over the last 12 months, underperforming the broader market. ^[3]
Index catalyst: S&P Dow Jones Indices will add Pinterest to the S&P MidCap 400 before the open on December 22, 2025, which typically brings incremental demand from index‑tracking funds. ^[4]
Q3 2025 fundamentals: Pinterest delivered Q3 2025 revenue of $1.05 billion (+17% YoY), net income of $92 million, adjusted EBITDA of $306 million (29% margin) and record 600 million monthly active users (MAUs). ^[5]
Q4 outlook: Management is guiding Q4 2025 revenue to $1.31–$1.34 billion, implying 14–16% year‑over‑year growth, slightly below prior Street expectations and a key reason for the November sell‑off. ^[6]
Analyst consensus:31 Wall Street analysts rate Pinterest a “Moderate Buy” with an average 12‑month price target of $39.10, implying ~46% upside from around $26.8. ^[7]
Valuation: At current levels, PINS trades around 9–9.5× trailing earnings and about 13–14× forward EV/EBITDA, well below many internet peers, and several independent models argue the shares are materially undervalued. ^[8]
Ownership: Roughly 88.8% of Pinterest’s float is held by institutional investors, with net institutional inflows of about $7.0 billion vs. $3.6 billion outflows over the last 12 months, even as insiders have been modest net sellers. ^[9]

1. How Pinterest stock looks as of December 5, 2025

According to MarketBeat and other price trackers, Pinterest closed on December 5 at about $26.76, down 1.7% on the session. ^[10]

On a longer‑term basis:

1 month: essentially flat to slightly positive after bouncing from post‑earnings lows. ^[11]
6 months: about –22%, hurt mainly by the sharp drop following Q3 earnings and guidance. ^[12]
Year to date: around –9%, versus a strong double‑digit gain in the S&P 500. ^[13]
1 year: roughly –17%, with the stock trading closer to its 52‑week low of $23.68 than its high of $40.90. ^[14]

A StockStory note on December 2 highlighted that Pinterest shares have dropped to about $26.96 over the last six months, a decline of 18.6%, while the S&P 500 gained 14.1% in the same period. ^[15]

For investors scanning Google News and Discover, that underperformance is central: PINS today is being framed as a “fallen growth story” trading at value‑style multiples.

2. Fresh catalyst: Pinterest joins the S&P MidCap 400

On December 5, S&P Dow Jones Indices announced a slate of index changes effective at the December 22 quarterly rebalance. Pinterest will be added to the S&P MidCap 400, replacing several outgoing constituents. ^[16]

Key points from the S&P announcement:

Pinterest (ticker PINS) will join the S&P MidCap 400 in the Communication Services sector. ^[17]
The change is tied to the regular Q4 index rebalance and aims to make the index more representative of its capitalization range. ^[18]

Why this matters for the stock:

Forced buying: Mid‑cap index funds and ETFs benchmarked to the S&P MidCap 400 must buy Pinterest shares ahead of or on the effective date. Historically, stocks added to major indices often see a short‑term boost in demand and trading volume, although the price impact varies widely.
Visibility: Being in a widely followed index raises Pinterest’s profile with institutional allocators and can tighten spreads and improve liquidity.
Benchmarking: Some active managers who track their risk relative to the index will be more inclined to consider or size PINS positions.

The index move comes at a time when Pinterest’s valuation multiples are compressed and sentiment is shaky, which could make any incremental demand more meaningful.

3. Q3 2025: Solid fundamentals, mixed guidance

Revenue and earnings

Pinterest’s Q3 2025 results, released in early November, were fundamentally strong: ^[19]

Revenue: $1.049 billion, up 16.8–17% year‑over‑year.
GAAP net income:$92.1 million, up sharply from $30.6 million a year ago.
GAAP diluted EPS:$0.13 vs. $0.04 in Q3 2024.
Adjusted EBITDA:$306.1 million, beating Street expectations and representing a 29.2% margin.
Free cash flow: roughly $318 million, for a 30.3% FCF margin. ^[20]

StockStory notes that Pinterest’s EBITDA margin has expanded significantly in recent years and averaged about 28% over the last two years, reflecting strong operating leverage from its high‑margin advertising business. ^[21]

User growth and engagement

User metrics remain a key part of the Pinterest story:

Monthly Active Users (MAUs):600 million, up around 63 million year‑on‑year and growing at roughly 11–12% annually over the last two years. ^[22]
Gross margin: close to 80% in Q3, among the best in consumer internet, enabling heavy investments in R&D and product. ^[23]
ARPU (average revenue per user): about $1.78 globally in Q3, up mid‑single digits year‑over‑year and still with a wide gap between high‑ARPU North America and lower‑ARPU international markets. ^[24]

An analysis of Q3 by StockStory emphasizes that the company is combining double‑digit user growth with solid monetization gains, a combination that remains relatively rare among social networks at this scale. ^[25]

The guidance that spooked the market

Despite these strong numbers, the forward guidance disappointed investors:

Pinterest guided Q4 2025 revenue to $1.313–$1.338 billion, implying about 14–16% growth vs. Q4 2024. ^[26]
That midpoint was slightly below consensus expectations (~$1.34 billion) at the time and suggested only modest acceleration despite heavy AI and product investments. ^[27]

This softer‑than‑hoped outlook, combined with concerns over higher spending (including AI infrastructure) and tax items, triggered a sharp post‑earnings sell‑off in early November that knocked roughly 20% off the share price in a single session, according to multiple media reports. ^[28]

AI‑driven shopping pivot

A detailed Q3 recap from Gotrade highlights how CEO Bill Ready now describes Pinterest as the “first AI‑powered visual shopping assistant,” not just a “digital mood board.” ^[29] Key themes:

AI everywhere: Pinterest processed around 80 billion queries in Q3, up roughly 44% year‑over‑year, as AI‑driven recommendations surface content without users always needing to type searches. ^[30]
Gen Z leadership: Gen Z now represents more than half of the user base and is the fastest‑growing segment, crucial for long‑term advertiser appeal. ^[31]
Shopping engagement: Outbound clicks to advertisers climbed about 40% year‑over‑year, signaling that more users are acting on the ideas they see, not just browsing. ^[32]
Amazon integration: Users who link their Amazon accounts can move directly from a shoppable pin to Amazon checkout, tightening the loop between inspiration and purchase. ^[33]

At the same time, ad pricing fell around 24%, mainly due to a mix shift toward faster‑growing but lower‑priced international markets and pressure on U.S. retailers facing margin headwinds and tariffs. ^[34] That trade‑off—more volume at lower prices—is at the heart of the bull/bear debate.

4. Wall Street’s Pinterest forecast: “Moderate Buy” with ~46% upside

Consensus rating and price target

MarketBeat’s latest forecast page for Pinterest shows a “Moderate Buy” consensus rating based on 31 analysts who have issued ratings in the last 12 months: ^[35]

Rating breakdown (31 analysts):
- 23 Buy (including 1 Strong Buy)
- 8 Hold
- 0 Sell
Average 12‑month price target:$39.10
Target range:$30 (low) to $50 (high)
Implied upside: ~46% vs. the current price around $26.8. ^[36]

Analyst commentary through late November and early December shows a wave of target cuts after Q3, but most firms maintained positive ratings:

Firms such as Wedbush, Guggenheim, Evercore ISI, Benchmark and JPMorgan cut their targets but kept “buy,” “outperform” or “overweight” ratings, typically landing in the mid‑30s to low‑40s per share. ^[37]
Morgan Stanley recently trimmed its target to around $32 but still rates the stock Overweight, signalling that even more cautious houses see upside from current levels. ^[38]

Zacks and other screening services also highlight Pinterest as a positively rated name in the online advertising and social media group, though they flag near‑term volatility tied to ad spending and macro data. ^[39]

Valuation perspectives

On valuation, several recent analyses argue that Pinterest now looks cheap relative to its growth and cash generation:

MarketBeat and TradingView data show PINS trading at roughly 9–9.5× trailing earnings, with a market cap around $18.5 billion and FY revenue near $3.6 billion. ^[40]
StockStory describes Pinterest as a “High Quality Timely Buy” and notes that at roughly $27 per share, the stock trades at about 13–14× forward EV/EBITDA, which they view as reasonable to attractive given margins and growth. ^[41]

A detailed valuation from Simply Wall St takes it further:

Their discounted cash flow (DCF) model projects free cash flow rising from around $1.13 billion today to nearly $2.0 billion by 2030 and $2.34 billion by 2035, then discounts those cash flows back to present. ^[42]
The model estimates a fair value of about $51.12 per share, implying Pinterest is roughly 47% undervalued versus a recent price near $27. ^[43]
They also note that at around 9.3× earnings, PINS trades far below the interactive media industry average (~17×) and below their own “fair” earnings multiple of about 14.6×. ^[44]

While all valuation models have limitations and rely on long‑term assumptions, the broad takeaway across research providers is consistent: the current price bakes in a lot of execution risk and macro caution.

5. Who owns Pinterest now? Institutions vs. insiders

Heavy institutional ownership

MarketBeat’s ownership data shows that Pinterest is overwhelmingly institutionally owned: ^[45]

Institutional ownership:88.81% of outstanding shares.
Institutional buyers (last 12 months):675, with about $7.02 billion in inflows across 222.9 million shares.
Institutional sellers (last 12 months):383, with about $3.55 billion in outflows.

Recent 13F‑driven news items in early December highlight ongoing activity:

Mirabella Financial Services LLP initiated a new stake of 59,034 shares (~$2.1 million) in Q2. ^[46]
CW Advisors LLC bought 241,915 shares (~$8.7 million), also in Q2. ^[47]
Groupe La Française acquired 97,631 shares (~$3.49 million). ^[48]
At the same time, large holder Marshall Wace LLP trimmed its position by about 770,000 shares, though it still held over 7.4 million shares worth ~$266 million at the time of its filing. ^[49]

These mixed but sizable flows suggest that professional investors remain very engaged with Pinterest—both bulls adding on weakness and others de‑risking after the post‑earnings drop.

Insider selling

Multiple recent filings show insider selling, which some headlines have focused on:

Director and co‑founder Benjamin Silbermann sold a bit over 100,000 shares at an average price in the mid‑$30s in late September. ^[50]
Insider Wanjiku Juanita Walcott sold roughly 74,000 shares around $26.89 in November, reducing her stake by about 20% but still retaining over 300,000 shares. ^[51]

Across the last 90 days, insiders have sold about 403,000 shares valued around $13.7 million, and insiders collectively own about 7.06% of the company. ^[52]

Insider selling does not automatically mean management is bearish—sales can reflect diversification, tax planning or preset trading plans—but it contrasts with the net buying behavior among institutions and is worth monitoring.

6. The strategic story: AI, shoppable discovery and a unique audience

Beyond the near‑term numbers, bulls emphasize Pinterest’s strategic positioning at the intersection of social, search and commerce.

A high‑intent, mostly unbranded search environment

Recent social media data from Sprout Social and Pinterest’s own business materials highlight several distinctive traits: ^[53]

About 96% of searches on Pinterest are “unbranded”—users search for generic ideas like “brown sofa” or “fall outfits” rather than specific brands. That gives advertisers a chance to win customers even if they’re not already top‑of‑mind.
80% of weekly Pinterest users report feeling inspired by the platform’s shopping experience, and Pinterest users tend to spend about twice as much when shopping on Pinterest compared with other social platforms. ^[54]
Pinterest is especially popular with Millennial and Gen Z women, and Gen Z’s share is rising, making it one of the more attractive platforms for lifestyle, fashion, home and beauty brands. ^[55]

This high‑intent, discovery‑oriented environment is structurally different from more passive feeds on some other platforms.

AI and recommender‑system investments

Academic work published in 2025 by Pinterest engineers offers a glimpse under the hood of its AI strategy:

A paper on deep reinforcement learning for ad ranking describes a system that tunes the utility function in Pinterest’s ad recommender, delivering roughly 9.7% higher click‑through rates (CTR) and 7.7% higher “long CTR” in tests versus more manual tuning. ^[56]
A separate study on user retention outlines a scalable framework for modeling “revisitation” behaviour—when users come back to saved content—and reports a measurable lift in active users (about 0.1%) at massive scale after deployment. ^[57]

Those kinds of incremental gains matter when applied to hundreds of millions of users and tens of billions of queries per quarter, and they reinforce the idea that Pinterest’s AI push is not just a buzzword but a long‑running infrastructure project.

Financial profile: high margins, strong cash, no leverage problem

From a financial standpoint, Pinterest today looks like an unusually profitable mid‑cap internet platform:

Gross margin: roughly 80%;
EBITDA margin: around 29% in Q3, with an average of about 28% over the last two years; ^[58]
Free cash flow margin: around 30% in Q3 and nearly 27% on a trailing two‑year basis; ^[59]
Balance sheet: about $2.67 billion in cash vs. ~$205 million of debt, leaving Pinterest with net cash equal to ~10–11% of its market cap. ^[60]

That combination of high margins and net cash gives management considerable optionality—whether that’s more buybacks, inorganic acquisitions, or heavier AI and product investment.

7. Risks and bear‑case arguments

Even with solid fundamentals, there are clear risk factors that keep some investors cautious and help explain the current valuation discount.

1. Advertising and macro sensitivity

Pinterest remains primarily an advertising‑driven business, and advertisers tend to cut discretionary budgets quickly during macro slowdowns.

Gotrade’s Q3 summary notes that some large U.S. retailers pulled back ad spending on Pinterest and other platforms, citing margin pressure and new tariffs, underscoring the company’s exposure to cyclical sectors like retail and home goods. ^[61]
Broader market coverage on December 5 highlighted that investors are still laser‑focused on inflation data and the Federal Reserve’s rate decisions, with expectations of another rate cut but lingering fears around growth. ^[62]

If the economy slows more sharply than expected, Pinterest’s revenue growth could decelerate, and advertisers might favour cheaper or more performance‑guaranteed channels.

2. Monetization mix and pricing pressure

Pinterest’s fastest‑growing user cohort is international, where ad prices are lower:

Q3 saw a 24% decline in ad pricing, largely offset by a strong increase in ad impressions. ^[63]
While this volume‑driven model can still produce healthy revenue growth, it means ARPU growth lags user growth, and investors worry that the company might need to keep spending heavily to maintain momentum.

If pricing pressure persists, Pinterest will have to squeeze more efficiency out of its AI‑targeting, shopping formats and partnerships to keep revenue per user moving higher.

3. Competition

Pinterest plays in a fiercely competitive arena, going head‑to‑head with:

Meta Platforms (Instagram, Facebook),
Alphabet (Google and YouTube),
Snap, TikTok and other visual‑first apps. ^[64]

Many of these rivals have larger user bases, deeper advertiser relationships and enormous AI budgets. Pinterest must continue to differentiate itself through commercial intent and a more positive, planning‑focused user experience to remain relevant to advertisers.

4. Execution risk on AI shopping vision

The AI‑powered shopping assistant narrative is compelling, but it is still a work in progress:

New surfaces like multimodal search, conversational assistants and deep commerce integrations must prove their ability to scale revenue without alienating users. ^[65]
Any missteps—such as overwhelming users with ads, or failing to deliver reliable product availability and pricing—could blunt engagement or damage Pinterest’s carefully cultivated brand.

Given the valuation reset after Q3, the market is clearly demanding proof, not promises, that this next phase can deliver.

8. What to watch next

For investors tracking Pinterest via Google News and Discover, several upcoming milestones and themes stand out.

December 22, 2025: S&P MidCap 400 inclusion

In the short term, the most concrete catalyst is the index addition:

Expect elevated trading volumes around the December 22 rebalance date as index funds adjust holdings. ^[66]
Market reactions to index changes are not guaranteed, but historically many additions see at least a temporary liquidity and demand bump.

Next earnings and guidance

The next earnings report (covering Q4 2025) will be scrutinized for:

Whether Pinterest can hit its 14–16% Q4 revenue growth guidance; ^[67]
Updated commentary on AI‑driven shopping formats, Amazon and other partnerships;
Trends in ad pricing vs. impressions, especially in North America vs. international markets;
Any changes to the medium‑term margin and free‑cash‑flow outlook.

Analysts currently expect Pinterest’s full‑year EPS to grow more than 30% over the next 12 months, so any sign of margin compression beyond what’s already in models could force another reset. ^[68]

Macro and the digital ad cycle

Finally, Pinterest remains tethered to macro inputs: inflation readings, Fed policy, consumer spending trends and retail health. Recent economic coverage notes that inflation is still above the Fed’s target, but easing enough that markets are pricing in another rate cut. ^[69]

A soft landing with modest rate cuts could support digital ad budgets and e‑commerce, while a sharper slowdown or renewed inflation spike would be headwinds.

Bottom line: A profitable platform priced for skepticism

As of December 5, 2025, Pinterest sits at a crossroads:

The bull case leans on:
- Strong user growth and engagement (600M MAUs and rising); ^[70]
- High margins and robust free cash flow; ^[71]
- A differentiated, shopping‑oriented discovery experience with attractive demographics; ^[72]
- Under‑appreciated AI capabilities and a cash‑rich balance sheet; ^[73]
- A Wall Street consensus that still calls for mid‑teens revenue growth and substantial upside from current prices. ^[74]
The bear case focuses on:
- Sensitivity to the ad cycle and retailer budgets; ^[75]
- Slower‑than‑hoped near‑term growth, as reflected in Q4 guidance; ^[76]
- Ongoing pricing pressure from international mix shifts; ^[77]
- Intense competition from much larger tech platforms.

Against that backdrop, the combination of index inclusion, heavy institutional ownership and valuation models pointing to substantial undervaluation makes Pinterest one of the more closely watched mid‑cap tech names heading into 2026.

As always, anyone considering PINS should weigh these factors against their own risk tolerance, time horizon and portfolio diversification needs. This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security.

References