Is TOST a Buy or a Sell? The Bull and Bear Case (2026)

That depends on which case you find more convincing, and both are on this page. The bull case rests on Location adds, plus the retail and international extension, with revenue (ttm) at ~$6.80 billion, up ~23% year over year in Q2 2026. The bear case rests on the clearest specific risk is regulatory. Analysts covering it are spread from $25.00 to $45.00, which is itself a signal that this is genuinely contested. If you believe the thesis, the real questions become sizing and overlap rather than timing. Walnut is not an investment adviser and this is not a recommendation.

Nobody can answer that for you, and the honest version of the question is narrower: has anything changed in the reason you bought it? The bear case on this page is the place to check. The clearest specific risk is regulatory. If that risk is what you were worried about and it is now playing out, that is a real signal. If the price simply fell while the thesis held, that is a different situation entirely. The most pessimistic published target is $25.00, -32.1% from the $36.80 price, which is one analyst's downside case rather than a floor. Walnut is not an investment adviser.

Location adds, plus the retail and international extension. Toast added ~9,500 net new locations in the second quarter of 2026, a record for the company, taking the installed base to ~180,000 from ~164,000 at the end of 2025. The most optimistic analyst target on TOST is $45.00, +22.3% from the $36.80 price. That figure is only reachable if this thesis works close to its best case.

The clearest specific risk is regulatory. Toast has been responding to a Federal Trade Commission Civil Investigative Demand received in June 2025 covering the marketing, sale, and operation of its restaurant systems and customer-service offerings, and in June 2026 the FTC staff sent the company a draft complaint and a proposed settlement order. Toast says it disagrees and is prepared to litigate, and states in its filings that it cannot estimate a reasonably possible loss, so the exposure is genuinely unquantified. Beyond that, ~82% of revenue tracks payment volume, which moves with restaurant traffic and discretionary dining spend, and price pressure on processing spreads from Block's Square, Fiserv's Clover, or Shift4 would compress the part of the business funding everything else. Governance is concentrated: Class B shares carry ten votes each, so ~65 million shares, around ~11% of the total, control a majority of the voting power. The most pessimistic published target is $25.00, -32.1% from the current price, which is roughly what the stock is worth if these risks bite rather than the drivers.

Cloud restaurant operating system combining point-of-sale software, handheld hardware and payment processing across roughly 180,000 locations.

Decide that in advance, because it is far harder to think clearly once a position is moving against you. The concrete tripwires here: the driver behind the bull case (Location adds, plus the retail and international extension) stalling in the reported numbers rather than in the narrative, the risk above (the clearest specific risk is regulatory) turning from a possibility into a reported fact, or the position growing large enough that a bad outcome would matter to your whole portfolio regardless of who is right.

A restaurant operating system. The visible parts are cloud point-of-sale software, kitchen displays, Toast Go handheld terminals, and digital ordering, plus payroll and operator lending. The part that pays the bills is payment processing: ~$60.7 billion of card volume ran through the platform in the second quarter of 2026, and financial technology solutions was ~$1.57 billion of ~$1.91 billion in quarterly revenue.

Because payment processing revenue is reported gross, with interchange and network fees included, and Toast keeps only a slice. Payments carried roughly ~23% gross margin in the second quarter of 2026 against roughly ~78% for subscriptions. So ~$6.80 billion of trailing revenue converts to about ~$1.82 billion of gross profit, and the ~3.1 times revenue multiple becomes roughly ~12 times gross profit.

Yes, on a GAAP basis and recently. Net income was ~$154 million in the second quarter of 2026 against ~$80 million a year earlier, and trailing twelve-month net income is near ~$486 million. Full-year 2025 net income was ~$342 million. The accumulated deficit of ~$982 million at June 30, 2026 is the residue of earlier loss-making years and is shrinking each quarter.