New York, Jan 17, 2026, 16:44 (EST) — Market closed.
Shopify Inc’s U.S.-listed shares closed down 1.38% on Friday at $155.81, while the Toronto-listed stock fell 1.21% to C$217.03. The U.S. shares traded between $155.57 and $159.92 and are still about 15% below their 52-week high. (Shopify Investors)
The pullback left Shopify heading into a long U.S. weekend with investors focused on rates, positioning and a widening earnings calendar. “Markets have been flat-lining” as results season gets under way, Anthony Saglimbene, chief market strategist at Ameriprise Financial, said. (Reuters)
Traders are also looking past Friday’s monthly options expiration — a regular reset point in derivatives markets — for a potential rise in day-to-day swings next week. Brent Kochuba, founder of options analytics service SpotGamma, said it could allow the S&P 500 to “start moving around a bit more.” Options are contracts that give investors the right to buy or sell at a set price by a set date. (Reuters)
Shopify, for its part, kept steering attention to AI-assisted shopping. In a Jan. 15 blog post tied to the NRF retail conference, the company said AI-driven traffic to Shopify sites has risen sixfold since January 2025 and orders attributed to AI searches are up 11 times; it also highlighted the Universal Commerce Protocol, which it said it co-developed with Google. Ashish Gupta, Google’s vice president and general manager of merchant shopping, said the protocol provides a “framework” for what he called the shift to agentic commerce. (Shopify)
The calendar has another hard date that matters for growth stocks: the Federal Reserve’s Jan. 27–28 policy meeting, followed by a press conference on Jan. 28. (Federal Reserve)
Shopify often trades like a proxy for risk appetite. When yields rise and investors rotate, the stock can move fast even without a clean, company-specific headline.
Next week’s tape could be messy. Traders will watch whether post-expiration volatility actually shows up, and whether early earnings read-throughs shift sentiment on consumer-facing tech.
But the downside case is easy to sketch. If rate expectations firm again or the “AI shopping” narrative takes longer to show up in transaction data, investors can decide the stock is priced for too much perfection.
The next U.S. session is Tuesday, and the next major macro signpost is the Fed decision on Jan. 28 — the kind of event that can reset multiples across the growth complex.
