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You're 100% right about long term investors. I remember seeing a statistic that shows most of today's most successful stocks started out bombing at their IPOs.
by ChrisNorstrom 14y ago
You're 100% right about long term investors. I remember seeing a statistic that shows most of today's most successful stocks started out bombing at their IPOs.
I didn't mean to come out as an armchair expert, just a believer in common sense. I reached my opinion by bundling the stock drop with: 1) Facebook's "ad click bots" story (I had a similar problem when I advertised on FB years back and have been hearing on and off about Facebook ad problems a lot over the years. 2) The revelation that at minimum 10% of FB accounts are fake (still not a bad percentage assuming it isn't secretly higher). 3) Revenue being based mainly on advertising (whose 0.1% click-through rate is going down each and every year). 4) FB getting closer to reaching its maximum realistically possible users. 5) A serious lack of innovation, drive, diversifying or anything at all going on at Facebook. 6) Near zero horizontal growth with no sign of vertical growth either.
At the moment it's just a sitting duck. I mean, my God what have they really done all these years? When a company branches out too far we call it a "Microsoft", when it has all branches and no trunk we call it a "Yahoo", and when it has only a trunk without branches it's now a "Facebook". The fact that they released "time-line" and "ask questions" shows how few options they have at growing or expanding (or how few they've tried). One trick, one pony indeed. They might go the way of Google and start expanding and experimenting after their IPO but from what we've seen. I'm not so sure at all.
- Silhouette 14y agoThe fact that they released "time-line" and "ask questions" shows how few options they have at growing or expanding (or how few they've tried). I think the greater concern for Facebook is that they have tried to expand their reach on several occasions in ways that would seem to favour them commercially, usually at the expense of people's privacy and/or making the user experience worse, but they have discovered that beyond a certain level of tolerance they will get enough pushback from their users to cancel the plans and they still have to eat the negative PR for a while. By your analogy, they want the trunk to keep growing, but the roots can't go any deeper to support it.