Head to Head Survey: Applied Digital (NASDAQ:APLD) versus Blue Owl Capital (NYSE:OBDC)

Applied Digital (NASDAQ:APLD) and Blue Owl Capital (NYSE:OBDC) are both mid-cap finance companies, but which is the better investment? We will compare the two companies based on the strength of their profitability, valuation, earnings, dividends, institutional ownership, risk and analyst recommendations.

Insider & Institutional Ownership

65.7% of Applied Digital shares are owned by institutional investors. Comparatively, 42.8% of Blue Owl Capital shares are owned by institutional investors. 11.8% of Applied Digital shares are owned by insiders. Comparatively, 0.1% of Blue Owl Capital shares are owned by insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that endowments, large money managers and hedge funds believe a company will outperform the market over the long term.

Risk and Volatility

Applied Digital has a beta of 6.64, suggesting that its share price is 564% more volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, Blue Owl Capital has a beta of 0.76, suggesting that its share price is 24% less volatile than the S&P 500.

Analyst Recommendations

This is a summary of recent ratings and recommmendations for Applied Digital and Blue Owl Capital, as provided by MarketBeat.com.

	Sell Ratings	Hold Ratings	Buy Ratings	Strong Buy Ratings	Rating Score
Applied Digital	0	0	12	1	3.08
Blue Owl Capital	0	2	3	3	3.13

Applied Digital currently has a consensus target price of $15.64, suggesting a potential downside of 27.98%. Blue Owl Capital has a consensus target price of $15.42, suggesting a potential upside of 16.44%. Given Blue Owl Capital’s stronger consensus rating and higher possible upside, analysts clearly believe Blue Owl Capital is more favorable than Applied Digital.

Profitability

This table compares Applied Digital and Blue Owl Capital’s net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

	Net Margins	Return on Equity	Return on Assets
Applied Digital	-107.22%	-50.03%	-13.45%
Blue Owl Capital	38.29%	11.24%	4.82%

Earnings and Valuation

This table compares Applied Digital and Blue Owl Capital”s revenue, earnings per share and valuation.

	Gross Revenue	Price/Sales Ratio	Net Income	Earnings Per Share	Price/Earnings Ratio
Applied Digital	$144.19 million	40.55	-$231.07 million	($1.09)	-19.92
Blue Owl Capital	$1.60 billion	4.24	$741.06 million	$1.51	8.77

Blue Owl Capital has higher revenue and earnings than Applied Digital. Applied Digital is trading at a lower price-to-earnings ratio than Blue Owl Capital, indicating that it is currently the more affordable of the two stocks.

Summary

Blue Owl Capital beats Applied Digital on 10 of the 15 factors compared between the two stocks.

About Applied Digital

Applied Digital Corporation designs, develops, and operates datacenters in North America. Its datacenters provide digital infrastructure solutions to the high-performance computing industry. The company also provides artificial intelligence cloud services, high performance computing datacenter hosting, and crypto datacenter hosting services. The company was formerly known as Applied Blockchain, Inc. and changed its name to Applied Digital Corporation in November 2022. Applied Digital Corporation is based in Dallas, Texas.

About Blue Owl Capital

Blue Owl Capital Corporation is a business development company. It specializes in direct and fund of fund investments. The fund makes investments in senior secured, direct lending or unsecured loans, subordinated loans or mezzanine loans and also considers equity-related securities including warrants and preferred stocks also pursues preferred equity investments, first lien, unitranche, and second lien term loans and common equity investments. Within private equity, it seeks to invest in growth, acquisitions, market or product expansion, refinancings and recapitalizations. It seeks to invest in middle market and upper middle market companies based in the United States, with EBITDA between $10 million and $250 million annually and/or annual revenue of $50 million and $2.5 billion at the time of investment. It seeks to invest in investments with maturities typically between three and ten years. It seeks to make investments generally ranging in size between $20 million and $250 million.