Wix stock surges following Starboard Value's 9% stake in the company

Wix shares are soaring after activist investor Starboard Value revealed its 9% stake in the company.

Video Transcript

[AUDIO LOGO]

SEANA SMITH: Well, my play today is WIX, the top Trending Ticker, one of the Top Trending tickers here on Yahoo Finance. Shares are surging, up just around 15% on activist investor Starboard Value revealing a 9% stake in the company. Reuters reporting that Starboard is in talks with the web platform company on how it can improve operations.

They believe that the company can become profitable and significantly improve their margins. I think they just have something to say about how they go about doing that. But WIX certainly has struggled so far this year. Shares off just about 47% since the start of the year. Of course, Dave, this coincides with the slowdown that we've seen more broadly in the tech space, more specifically also in the e-commerce space. So it will be interesting to see the steps forward that WIX takes in order to kind of right the ship here with their business.

DAVE BRIGGS: I got a good reason to root for WIX. Doing a little digging on there chief operating officer and president, a former commander in the Israeli Navy. They are an Israeli-based company. When the war broke out in Ukraine, he made an effort to pull 1,000 employees out of harm's way in Ukraine ahead of that invasion.

It ended up spreading throughout the whole company, as employees were stepping up to house these people, move, giving them food, giving them shelter. And look, the basic quote from the chief operating officer is, doing good is good business. So I think a message--

SEANA SMITH: I'm rooting for them too now.

DAVE BRIGGS: --we can all get behind from them. All right.