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Meta shares drop 20% on Q4 earnings miss, weak outlook

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Re: Meta shares drop 20% on Q4 earnings miss, weak outlook

#301

Post by parineum »

dylan604 wrote: post #236
Kranar wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feel free to do a deep dive on the meaning and nature of earnings estimates, and you'll find it's mostly just a service that exists because it gives the appearance of legitimacy to various financial institutions. Earnings estimates do not come down from God and there's no one single earnings estimate either, different sites and sources will report different estimates. Typically it's just the average or the median of…

This is what I've never understood. These estimates are just that, estimates. They are guesses, potentially educated guesses based on some data, but guesses/hopes/prayers none the less. It's like sports teams and all of the talking heads giving their opinions on the upcoming matches. In sports, it's called betting. But in business, it's called investing. It's the same thing, only one is more widely accepted an legal.

> In sports, it's called betting. But in business, it's called investing. It's the same thing, only one is more widely accepted an legal.

One incentivizes people to build iPhones and the other takes money from poor people.

Re: Meta shares drop 20% on Q4 earnings miss, weak outlook

#302

Post by IgorPartola »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #299
IgorPartola wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So in other words TikTok has made them have to pause and switch to prioritize Reels (which are in every way worse than TikTok BTW) and that means less eyeballs on ads. Honestly Facebook at this point is entirely unusable. My feed is full of shit I don’t want (and I block ads at DNS level so I can’t even imagine what it looks like for most people): Reels, half baked “memes” that are just really random thoughts from pe…

> My feed is full of shit I don’t want I don't log in to Facebook very often, but when I do it's not bad at all. I scroll through a few updates from friends and family and catch up with a few people, then I close it for another week or two. There isn't just one "Facebook" that we all see, obviously. Your feed is going to be a reflection of the groups you've joined and the friends you keep (and haven't muted). If you'…

Or I could just go follow different groups I care about on Reddit. I don’t really care that much what Karen from high school thinks of her morning latte and spending the time to improve my feed is just not worth it to me.

Re: Meta shares drop 20% on Q4 earnings miss, weak outlook

#303

Post by Auracle »

eloisius wrote: post #290
IgorPartola wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So in other words TikTok has made them have to pause and switch to prioritize Reels (which are in every way worse than TikTok BTW) and that means less eyeballs on ads. Honestly Facebook at this point is entirely unusable. My feed is full of shit I don’t want (and I block ads at DNS level so I can’t even imagine what it looks like for most people): Reels, half baked “memes” that are just really random thoughts from pe…

Somewhere in the A/B test slurry there is sometimes a menu item that sorts your news feed chronologically. It really lays bare what a ghost town Facebook is. In my default feed there is all the garbage that you described perfectly, and a burst of content like a friend’s wedding. That little nugget gets replayed over and over so that it feels like that’s what’s “going on.” Chronologically, it’s old news and no one I’m…

Ironically I feel like the change away from chronological order is what started the slow decline of my feed. I used to see things from people I cared about but didn’t interact with much. Now all I see are things from the same 10 people that I’m closest with, and I don’t care to scroll further.

Re: Meta shares drop 20% on Q4 earnings miss, weak outlook

#304

Post by kstrauser »

mathattack wrote: post #174
dmurray wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really plausible that the market can predict Facebook's earnings to within 5% and that such a small miss would cause a rational investor to value Facebook 20% lower. This seems more like a symptom of the market being generally skittish, with a small side of "expected" earnings actually being a low-biased estimate, so it's more like a 10% miss.

It’s not about accuracy. If a stock is priced at a huge multiple to earnings and sales, the market consensus is enormous profit growth for a sustained period. When the slope of the curve moves (or changes direction) the NPV (Net Present Value) of future cash flows drops dramatically. The miss is also against future guidance. This could be answering a question of “Is Facebook too distracted to grow their core business…

Whoa, thank you! I’d had that same question, and now that makes much more sense.

Re: Meta shares drop 20% on Q4 earnings miss, weak outlook

#305

Post by asd88 »

PascLeRasc wrote: post #296
asd88 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the companies whose stock price has been affected the most are making up for the loss by giving more stock. I’d expect Facebook to do the same to retain their talent if the stock drops significantly.

Off topic: when companies give out stock like this, where is it coming from? Are they printing shares out of thin air or buying back shares to give to employees?

They issue more stock and the existing investors’ ownership is diluted.

Re: Meta shares drop 20% on Q4 earnings miss, weak outlook

#306

Post by IgorPartola »

michaelmcdonald wrote: post #286
IgorPartola wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So in other words TikTok has made them have to pause and switch to prioritize Reels (which are in every way worse than TikTok BTW) and that means less eyeballs on ads. Honestly Facebook at this point is entirely unusable. My feed is full of shit I don’t want (and I block ads at DNS level so I can’t even imagine what it looks like for most people): Reels, half baked “memes” that are just really random thoughts from pe…

I’m assuming you are using a Pi-hole to block the ads? From my understanding that is becoming less effective with companies like YouTube and Facebook since they serve ads directly from their domain.

I use NextDNS which works pretty well but yes it does seem like ads on platforms like this are creeping back in.

Re: Meta shares drop 20% on Q4 earnings miss, weak outlook

#307

Post by PragmaticPulp »

IgorPartola wrote: post #302
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My feed is full of shit I don’t want I don't log in to Facebook very often, but when I do it's not bad at all. I scroll through a few updates from friends and family and catch up with a few people, then I close it for another week or two. There isn't just one "Facebook" that we all see, obviously. Your feed is going to be a reflection of the groups you've joined and the friends you keep (and haven't muted). If you'…

Or I could just go follow different groups I care about on Reddit. I don’t really care that much what Karen from high school thinks of her morning latte and spending the time to improve my feed is just not worth it to me.

> I don’t really care that much what Karen from high school thinks of her morning latte and spending the time to improve my feed is just not worth it to me.

If you're not interested in content from people in your social network, then I don't understand what you're expecting to get out of a social network anyway. Facebook isn't a bad way to keep up with friends and family, but if you don't like your friends on any platform then you're probably not going to have a good time.

In other words: You're not their target customer. As with any business, trying to extrapolate your own use case on to the general public is going to be very misleading.

Re: Meta shares drop 20% on Q4 earnings miss, weak outlook

#308

Post by aierou »

zepto wrote: post #270
lhorie wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, if you don't have a stock position, why parrot the same tired narrative? It's not adding any insight and it's not like their stock never had downswing before. At one point the crowd here was like oh fb ipo so embarrassing, to oh fb eng so hot much react, to oh fb so evil now, crash and burn pls. Such fickleness. Surely we can do better than that.

Facebook is a machine that makes people parrot tired narratives that are devoid of insight.

Apparently so is HN

Re: Meta shares drop 20% on Q4 earnings miss, weak outlook

#309

Post by IgorPartola »

Auracle wrote: post #303
eloisius wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somewhere in the A/B test slurry there is sometimes a menu item that sorts your news feed chronologically. It really lays bare what a ghost town Facebook is. In my default feed there is all the garbage that you described perfectly, and a burst of content like a friend’s wedding. That little nugget gets replayed over and over so that it feels like that’s what’s “going on.” Chronologically, it’s old news and no one I’m…

Ironically I feel like the change away from chronological order is what started the slow decline of my feed. I used to see things from people I cared about but didn’t interact with much. Now all I see are things from the same 10 people that I’m closest with, and I don’t care to scroll further.

I guess it’s hard to make ads look organic when it’s chronological?

Re: Meta shares drop 20% on Q4 earnings miss, weak outlook

#310

Post by School-Cotton »

kodemager wrote: post #167
codingkev wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook is dying slowly in the developed world, that is true. However it is still growing in emerging markets. And most importantly: FB is still generating tons of cash to fund the other assets. WhatsApp has basically zero monetization right now but billions of users. Huge potential cash cow. Instagram still has a ton of potential for further optimized monetization. Think fully embedded 1-click buying for things lik…

> if executed right I think this right there is the biggest issue for the companies that sell consumer data. Google has had so many golden eggs, office365 before Microsoft, the cloud infrastructure before AWS and so on, and they keep fumbling the ball because their organisation is geared toward a very different form of sales. The fact that Instagram didn’t become an Etsy styled platform for artists when it was the ma…

Facebook doesn’t sell consumer data. They sell ads which they target using consumer data. Not at all the same thing.
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