Beyond Meat coverage by Foolish writers: time to cover the upside?

[Sorry. I’m new to these boards and can’t find a way to tag this post appropriately because I can’t find a tag for Beyond Meat/@BYND or add one. Also, I initially unintentionally posted it to the wrong category and have since deleted it from there.]

Just a note to express my frustration with the relentlessly negative coverage of Beyond Meat by Fool’s pundits (punctuated by rare exceptions). As others may have noticed, prior to last week’s 2022 Q4 earnings report, it had become an endless stream of “Beyond Meat is down 99% since its IPO: time to buy?” and disingenuous, clickbaity variations thereof. And of course, it never is “time to buy,” according to the bearish writers.

Okay. They’re entitled to their opinions. But not to their own distorted confirmation-biased facts/errors. After this latest ER, I was hoping to see some bullish coverage for a change. To some extent, Dan Caplinger’s piece fit that bill. But even it couldn’t help not only to damn with faint praise (it seems to me) or under-report the strides BYND has made to rein in its losses and hunker down in survival/long-term sustainable growth mode. What I can only speculate is confirmation bias caused Caplinger to erroneously report:

“The latest numbers from Beyond Meat weren’t pretty. Revenue in the fourth quarter dropped 21% year over year to $80 million. Net losses ballooned to $67 million, or $1.05 per share…”

No! The whole point of Beyond’s Q4 is that YOY quarterly losses (as implied by the construction of the above sentences) didn’t balloon at all. They actually plummeted (to mirror Caplinger’s negative slant), from $80 million to $67 million and from $1.27 to $1.05 a share. Even more importantly to long-term BYND bulls like me (and the Fool itself – still – judging by its disclosures) was the sequential improvement. In Q3, the losses were $102 million and $1.60 per share.

BYND is delivering on its commitment to right its ship and that’s why we witnessed such a stampede of short covering on Friday. Shorts who have been banking on the “going to $0” thesis had the rug pulled out from under them. The comps for all the other quarters this year are cut from the same bullish cloth. Yes, BYND is now selling less (because for now, in this environment, selling too much means losing too much), but its loss as a percentage of sales is being reined in. There’s a bull case to be made. Why isn’t Fool at least making it as an exercise in impartiality? And if all you can do is keep hammering BYND when it’s down (and even when it’s up), all I can say is:

“Beyond Meat Looks Like it’s Making a Comeback: Time for Motley Fool to Stop Kicking it Whether it’s Down or Up?”

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