Now 20% down. 
3 Likes
Such is life 
2 Likes
Considering their constant average YoY ROIC of 20%, 0 debt and always-in-the-black cash flow, it looks like getting 5 for the price of 4 
Have to agree here.
Seems like guidance was overly conservative and I think there will always be a few stumbles as revenue drivers change (changing relevance of newsfeed and pushing Stories). Data privacy issues weren’t a problem. Increased costs due to headcount and investments seems like the right thing to do to stay at the top of their game.
Some tumbles here and there but I think for the long term shareholder, it feels attractive. It is still the best internet real estate for advertisers.
1 Like
That’s one way to look at it. The daily active users in Europe shrunk from 282 million to 276 million. So another way to look at it is that a new trend may have started, at least in our continent - although I’m sure WhatsApp and Instagram are going strong.
3 Likes
I think Facebook.com is dying and will be dead in 10-20 years if not less. But not $FB as a conglomerate.
Also imagine what a boost it will be once they will come up with an idea of WhatsApp monetisation!
3 Likes
Look no further, sir - WeChat (Tencent)! 
A monetised WhatsApp!
In a meeting with James Anderson (PM for SMT) he said FB Messenger was made to try and replicate WeChat, but seems like that failed.
Tencent was actually interested in buying WhatsApp when Facebook bought it for $16b. Unfortunately, Tencent’s price tag for WhatsApp was only half that of FB’s!
3 Likes
Tencent is another one I think will dominate the market in long term, mostly Chine who are exponentially becoming wealthier.
I wish it would be offered by Freetrade one day too, regardless of no ISA eligibility.
1 Like
The Hong Kong Stock Exchange is high on our list. 
2 Likes
Always baffles how long it is taking them to emulate the wechat business model in the West, when they do god help us
This was my first thought, I agree with @Vlad I don’t think Facebook still will be a growing platform the the next 5-10 years
2 Likes
Lol do you remember when they were trying to charge £1 a year
1 Like
Ridiculous that was! I would have thought they will simply analyse what you write and offer better targeted contextual adverts on other Facebook products. Although they do have (or had) a toggle to stop sharing data with Facebook, I would be rather certain they still collect it anyway, they love data!
2 Likes
Another contributing factor may be that FB is simply running out of humans on the planet:
https://twitter.com/antoniogm/status/1022254629151637505
Antonio was a Product Manager at Facebook, and after he left, he wrote Chaos Monkeys. I really enjoyed the book. He is not censoring himself beyond what he absolutely might have to do for legal reasons - and a lot of the story resonates with my own experiences in big tech and startups.
His calculation as to FB hitting its growth wall is only a bit off. It’s worth reading the page in that tweet.
That said, this is only one view on Facebook, and only on the growth outlook of the core product. As always, do your own research. 
5 Likes
Given all this hype about FB, I am now tempted to look deeper into their quarterly report and maybe draft something similar to the Netflix analysis. Have nothing to do tomorrow anyway 
9 Likes
It makes sense to me there are only so many accessible humans, although the expectations that the emerging markets will eventually be facebook members isn’t gurenteed, it would be interesting to see how many members there at in India for example vs how many active mobile phones there are since that’s most Indians only source for internet, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s quite low.
There is an additional growth area, new generations of kids but it seems facebook is now one of the least popular social platforms for teens (2017 saw less than 8% say facebook was their most preferred, down from over 40% in 2012).
https://www.statista.com/statistics/250172/social-network-usage-of-us-teens-and-young-adults/
Not so say there won’t be other areas of growth, if they pull their finger out with WhatsApp and have integration with the world with regards to payments and generally managing our lives through it like wechat they will do just fine.
@Vlad another review would be welcome the last Netflix one was great even if it has really raised my expectations on the amount of research I might need to do when the app is available and I start investing
3 Likes
New signups will become less important for FB going forward. With the announcement of a dating service and Instagram TV, the new metric might be how long the 2.5 billion people spend on their apps/services.
4 Likes
Ah yes the dating service, the next best place to get detailed personal information to sell for advertising when your main platform is under scrutiny
2 Likes
It’s getting interesting!
6 Likes
$990.2bn as of this second! The spread is a bit wonky ($197.3/$197.13) but if they grow to $198.9587 per share sharp after 14:30 GMT, it will be a $1,000,000,000,000 market cap potentially even today.
Once this psychological barrier is breached, we could expect the rivals to get their rather quickly too.
Edit: @freetrade_cal’s article refers to $203.50 as the “required price”, which does not quite make sense to me.
Current market cap is $956.48bn at $190.29 per share. So if take it into the equation, $1000/x=$956.48/$190.29 → $1000/x=$5.02 → x=$1000/$5.02 → x=$198.8587.
Hence the necessary 4.55% increase in the market cap (956.48 to 1000) will be achieved by a respective 4.55% increase in the share price from $190.29 to $198.9587.
Am I wrong anywhere here, please correct me if yes?
3 Likes
I wouldn’t rely on MacRumours - I just find it’s one of the only places to get up to date Apple news without being bombarded by ads. On finance twitter everyone has a different theory on what share price = 1 trillion market cap, so we’ll likely see many news reports with different info if it eventually breaks.
2 Likes