Better Home & Finance stock doubles after investor behind Opendoor rally calls it the ‘Shopify of mortgages’

Better Home & Finance (BETR) stock more than doubled early Monday after activist investor Eric Jackson called the company “the Shopify of mortgages” in a post on X, announcing a strong bullish take on the real estate company.

Better Home, which opened for trading at $33.50, traded as high as $73 in the wake of Jackson’s announcement before giving up some of those gains and settling around $60 at noon ET on Monday.

Jackson said in the post that his hedge fund, EMJ Capital, has a long position in the stock.

“Better [Home] ($BETR) is the Shopify of mortgages,” Jackson wrote. “It’s rebuilding a $15T industry from scratch with AI … I believe BETR is a potential 350-bagger in 2 years.”

“They laugh at BETR now at $34 like they laughed at [Carvana] at $3.50 and OPEN at 51¢. But this is no meme,” he added.

Shopify, the software giant whose technology enables companies to set up online storefronts, has become a dominant force in the past few years in shaping how direct-to-consumer e-commerce business is transacted.

Carvana, the stock pick that made Jackson a big name in retail trading circles, was trading below $10 when he first engaged with the company’s leadership in February 2023. The stock now trades at more than $390.

Jackson’s call comes after a months-long saga of upheaval and price swings at fellow real estate company Opendoor Technologies (OPEN), which Jackson price-targeted at $82 in July while the company was trading firmly in penny-stock territory below $1.

Read more about today’s market action.

Opendoor, which now trades north of $9, most recently jumped on the news that Kaz Nejatian, the COO of Shopify (SHOP), would be taking over as CEO. This comes after Opendoor’s previous chief, Carrie Wheeler, resigned amid intense pressure from Jackson, co-founder Keith Rabois, and the company’s retail investor base, largely arguing that Wheeler lacked the appetite for ambitious growth needed to take the company into its next stage.