Newsletter · 2026-10-03 · Ashutosh Agarwal

David Einhorn Read Peloton's Business Right but the Stock Fell - Track Record - October 2024 to October 2026

A historical scorecard of Greenlight Capital's David Einhorn, who pitched Peloton long at $6.14 on October 24, 2024, with performance measured through the October 2, 2026 close. Peloton fell 19.9% against the S&P 500's 32.9% gain even as the business turned profitable, and his HP and CNH longs also trailed. Verdict: Wrong on the stock, right on the business.

Track Record

David Einhorn, October 2024 to October 2026

This is a historical review of David Einhorn's October 2024 stock picks, led by his Peloton long of October 24, 2024 (with HP Inc. the same day and CNH Industrial on November 13, 2024), with performance measured through the October 2, 2026 close. It was published on October 3, 2026; the prices and grades below are as of the October 2, 2026 cutoff.

In the dock this issue: Greenlight Capital's David Einhorn and his October 2024 Peloton pitch. The verdict: he called the turnaround, but the shares went the other way.

On October 23, 2024, David Einhorn walked on stage at the Robin Hood Investors Conference in New York and pitched Peloton ($PTON). Bloomberg's anchors said he came "dressed in full gear."

The next morning he went on Bloomberg and repeated the pick on air, with an HP Inc. ($HPQ) long alongside it.

Two years on, Peloton has done most of what Einhorn said it would. It cut costs, margins went up, a new CEO arrived, and it had its first full year of net profit.

The stock is down about 20%. Over the same stretch the S&P 500 is up about 33%.

This issue is about the gap between those two facts.

The Call

Who: David Einhorn, founder and president of Greenlight Capital. Where: Bloomberg Talks, "Greenlight Capital Pres/Portfolio Mgr/Founder David Einhorn Talks Robin Hood Investors Conference" (October 24, 2024). The same interview ran on Bloomberg Tech with hosts Caroline Hyde and Ed Ludlow that day. Ticker: Peloton Interactive ($PTON). It closed at $6.14 on October 24, 2024.

The setup was a charity stock-picking game run with the Robin Hood Foundation. Einhorn described it as: "Pick a long, pick a short, see how it does over the next six months." He kept his short secret and named his long:

"I'm going to pick Peloton, which is the stock that I pitched yesterday at the Robin Hood conference."

The thesis, in his words:

"They have a large customer base that pays $44 a month and is extremely engaged, rides an average 13 times a month and has very, very low attrition. So most subscription type models like this trade at really high valuations."

His diagnosis was that Peloton had built its costs for a much bigger company than it became:

"They had a cost base, which was entirely based on, hey, the only thing that matters to us is revenues because Wall Street values us on price to sales... there's a lot of cost cutting for Peloton to do... And if they do that, the margins will improve a lot. And the stock is relatively inexpensive relative to other types of subscription model type of company."

He also offered two ways for the stock to work even if things went badly:

"Besides, they're going to get a new CEO who should be announced sometime relatively soon. And in the worst case, if they're not really able to turn around, this is certainly the type of company that there's a number of larger companies I think that would be very interested in owning this if it came down to that."

The anchor closed the segment by calling it Einhorn's "favorite long pick right now."

What he predicted:

• Direction: Long, meaning he bet the price would rise.
• Thesis: Cost cuts lead to higher margins. A subscription business this loyal deserves a higher valuation.
• Catalysts: A new CEO soon. A possible takeover by a bigger company as a safety net.
• Price target: None.
• Timeframe: Six months for the charity contest (to about April 2025). The investment thesis had no end date.

The side calls from the same interview:

• HP Inc. ($HPQ), long, closed at $36.47. He said: "PCs are due for a regular replacement cycle because a lot were bought after COVID in 2020, 2021. And we could have a better than normal cycle if AI PCs turn out to be a thing. But that only trades about 10 times earnings, pays a three and something percent dividend or spending 100 percent of the free cash flow returning it to shareholders. So you get about a 7 percent buyback. So we can see, you know, mid-teens, high-teens growth for the next couple of years."
• CNH Industrial ($CNH), long, three weeks later. At CNBC's Delivering Alpha conference, Einhorn named the farm-equipment maker as his new pick. CNBC's Morgan Brennan relayed it on Closing Bell Overtime, "Rocket Lab CEO On Meteoric Growth of Business..." (November 13, 2024): "Einhorn saying he thinks it can double in the next year... He says the equipment ages and will need to be replaced." That is the anchor's paraphrase, not Einhorn's own words. It is graded below with that caveat.

What Happened

Peloton: the business kept the promise

Almost every part of the operating thesis came true:

• New CEO, a week later. On October 31, 2024, Peloton named Peter Stern, then President of Ford Integrated Services, as CEO from January 1, 2025 (Peloton press release, Oct 31, 2024).
• Cost cuts, faster than planned. The same day, Peloton said it was hitting cost-saving targets "faster than we expected" and was on track for more than $200 million of run-rate savings by the end of fiscal 2025. Analysts raised price targets across the board. BofA upgraded the stock from Underperform to Buy, citing "much higher than expected EBITDA" (EBITDA is a common measure of operating profit).
• More cuts. In November 2025 Stern announced another $100 million of savings, telling shareholders: "Our operating expenses remain too high, which hinders our ability to invest in our future."
• Profit. In August 2026 Stern said: "Fiscal 2026 was a defining milestone as Peloton delivered its first full year of net profitability." Guidance for fiscal 2027 adjusted EBITDA is $475–525 million. In early 2025 the full-year guide was $300–350 million (Peloton Q4 FY2026 and Q2 FY2025 results).

Peloton: the stock did not follow

The two halves of the story:

• Early on, Einhorn won. Six weeks after the pitch Peloton was up 72%. He also won his own contest window: up 2.3% while the S&P 500 fell 5.6% through the April 2025 tariff selloff.
• Then subscribers kept leaving. Paid Connected Fitness subscriptions were 2.662 million in fiscal Q3 2026, down 7.6% from a year earlier (Peloton Q3 FY2026 results, May 7, 2026). A price increase raised churn, the rate at which subscribers cancel (Citi, Feb 12, 2026). Fiscal 2026 revenue guidance was cut in February 2026, and Goldman Sachs dropped its target from $12.50 to $7.
• The latest bearish case. On September 8, 2026, Morgan Stanley downgraded the stock to Underweight with a $4.50 target. It said the "top of funnel has meaningfully narrowed": gross subscriber additions are down about 78% from the peak as people move to strength training and gyms.

The plain-English version: Einhorn assumed a loyal, shrinking-slowly subscriber base would be valued like other subscription businesses once it made money. Peloton did make money. Investors decided a business that keeps losing subscribers deserves a low multiple however profitable it is today. The "low attrition" he pointed to did not last.

The takeover safety net never came into play. No buyer appeared. Peloton went the other way: it joined the S&P SmallCap 600 in May 2026 and signed partnerships, including one with Spotify (April 2026).

HP Inc.: the replacement cycle arrived, the earnings didn't

Why it went wrong:

• Three costs he didn't foresee. Component inflation hit first (Nov 2024). Tariffs came in 2025, and HP cut its fiscal 2025 EPS guidance to $3.00–3.30 from $3.45–3.75 in May 2025. The shares fell 15% that day. Then came the 2026 memory-chip price spike. Morgan Stanley called it a "supercycle" that would squeeze PC makers, and Wells Fargo noted memory and storage had grown to about 35% of a PC's cost of materials.
• Earnings shrank instead of growing. HP's fiscal 2026 EPS guide was $2.90–3.20, below where fiscal 2025 started. That is the opposite of the "mid-teens, high-teens growth" Einhorn described.
• A surprise CEO exit. CEO Enrique Lores left in February 2026 to run PayPal.
• What he did get right. The PC refresh and AI PCs were real. HP's fiscal Q3 2026 revenue of $15.68 billion beat estimates "powered by higher PC prices" (Bernstein, Aug 27, 2026), and the stock has rallied hard off its February low. The dividend (roughly 3% a year) narrows the loss to about -6% total return by our rough estimate. That is still about 39 points behind the market.

CNH Industrial: no double within the year

• The target. A double would have meant about $20. The stock has never closed above $14.40.
• Trading on his words. CNH jumped about 6% after hours on his comments. Anyone who bought at the next day's $10.66 close is up 26.4%, slightly behind the S&P 500's gain over the same span.

The Verdict

Peloton: Wrong on the stock, right on the business

Let's be fair first:

• The diagnosis was correct. Peloton's cost base was too big, and cutting it lifted margins sharply.
• The CEO prediction was nearly exact. Stern was named a week after the pitch.
• He won the contest he entered. It was a six-month game, and over those six months Peloton beat the market by about 8 points.

But a stock call is graded on the stock:

• The result. Someone who bought at $6.14 on Einhorn's pitch and held is down 19.9%. An index fund over the same period made 32.9%, a 52.8-point gap.
• The miss. The thesis rested on "very, very low attrition." The subscriber base kept shrinking, and the market valued the shrinkage more than the profit.
• The safety net. The takeover floor he pointed to never came into play.

A note on Greenlight's own trading, which was smarter than a buy-and-hold reading of the call:

• Out and back in. By February 2026 the firm had sold and then rebought. Einhorn told CNBC on February 11, 2026: "we bought, then sold, then bought it back" (as reported by The Fly). Peloton closed at $4.32 that day.
• Added in Q1. Greenlight's March 31, 2026 filing showed the stake increased.
• Fully out in Q2. The June 30, 2026 filing, disclosed August 14, 2026, showed the position fully sold. Greenlight files these holdings reports as DME Capital Management.
• Good timing. Peloton traded between $4.30 and $6.48 that quarter. It ended June at $5.91, up 36.8% from the February re-buy, and has fallen 16.8% since.

That was good trading. It is not what the public call said. The public call was a long on Peloton's long-term value, and that long has lost money against the market.

HP Inc.: Wrong

• Why it looked right. At 10 times earnings with a big buyback, the stock looked cheap.
• What broke it. Tariffs and memory costs pushed earnings down, not up. The stock fell by half before recovering, and it is still below the call price two years later.
• His part right. The AI PC idea was real.
• His part wrong. The earnings path, which was the core of the case, went the other way.

CNH Industrial: Wrong on the target and timeframe (graded on a paraphrase)

• The miss. "Double in the next year" was very specific and very wrong: the stock gained 0.5% in that year while the market gained 12.6%.
• The late recovery. The ag-equipment replacement thesis has since helped the stock pull slightly ahead of the market over the full period.
• What Greenlight did. It reduced its CNH stake in Q1 2026.

Overall: Einhorn's case work on Peloton was often sharp. All three public long calls from the fall of 2024 have still trailed the S&P 500 over the periods he set, by between 12 and 53 points.

Have They Changed Their Tune?

• February 11, 2026, CNBC interview (as reported by The Fly). Asked about Peloton, Einhorn said "we bought, then sold, then bought it back." That is a quiet doubling down near the stock's lows. He did not give a new thesis or target.
• May 2026, Q1 holdings filing. Greenlight added to Peloton.
• May 12, 2026, Closing Bell (CNBC) with Scott Wapner, after his Sohn Conference pitch. Einhorn's five new pitches were Acadia, Centene, Fluor, Versant and Victoria's Secret, which he called companies that "have sort of underperformed... and there's an affirmative plan by the management teams to improve and transform them." That is close to how he pitched Peloton. Peloton did not come up.
• August 14, 2026, Q2 holdings filing. Greenlight had fully exited Peloton. The Clip Out, a Peloton fan podcast, picked it up in "New Peloton Workout History Filters Explained" (August 21, 2026): "They fully liquidated their Peloton stake during the second quarter of 2026... And that made a reaction of the stock falling 6%."
• HP and CNH. We found no later podcast comment from Einhorn on either name. Greenlight cut its CNH stake in Q1 2026.

Bottom line: Einhorn did not publicly walk back the Peloton thesis. He traded around it, then quietly sold, before Morgan Stanley's September downgrade and a further 12.6% drop.

Running Scorecard: David Einhorn

Track Record so far, across the series: Chamath Palihapitiya 2 Right. Brad Gerstner 1 Mixed. Gavin Baker 1 Right. Bill Gurley 1 Right (with a Too Early on the wider thesis). Cathie Wood 1 Mixed. Bill Ackman 2 Wrong. David Einhorn 1 Wrong on the stock with the business right, plus 2 Wrong.

Next issue: Jim Chanos.