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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

#421

Post by blihp »

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.

The markets reward predictable businesses and guidance often matters more than the current quarter, assuming management has any credibility. Whether that predictability is from the companies own guidance or analyst estimates[1] is fine. If quarter after quarter and year after year a company can't meet or beat (or switches from consistently beating to only consistently meeting), then the stock is often punished. If it misses the current quarter and guides down, the markets typically re-calibrates valuations downward which is what appears to be going on here.

[1] For example, Apple used to play a sandbagging game with their guidance. After a few years most analysts caught on and if Apple didn't beat their numbers by a consistent amount, the stock would get hammered on earnings despite the fact that they beat guidance. When a company consistently sandbags (i.e. basically gives themselves an easy target to hit for the coming quarters/year), analyst estimates tend to matter more.

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

#422

Post by ballenf »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #410
matt_wilson_206 wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finally, someone with a similar Facebook experience to my own. I've been reading threads about how horrific the FB feed is for years, but my own is literally 99% updates from friends I don't get to see, and an occasional ad (that is interesting more often than not). Glad to know I'm not completely alone!

99% of what you see is updates from friends, but are you seeing all of your friends updates? When a friend posts, I want to see it. Simple. Sometime, years ago, FB decided to pick and choose what to show me from my friend's feeds. That's when I skipped out of FB, deleted my account.

I want to hear about everything that my friends want to tell me so long as it requires a slight modicum of effort on their part.

Facebook turned everyone into bulk junk mailers. They pay the postage and then slap ads on the flyers everyone sends out. People get to spam their friends with basically zero effort.

If Facebook can weed out zero effort, low value posts from my friends with a high degree of accuracy that at least blunts some of the damage the platform itself has done.

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

#424

Post by aierou »

ohashi wrote: post #393
aierou wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently so is HN

So do you work for facebook or is your only purpose on HN to try to defend the company?

I am interested in the virtual reality space, and started posting because I was frustrated by the spread of misinformation/propaganda. Ironically, there is a lot of misinformation about Facebook. I'm sure my contributions are mostly meaningless, but it has at least been interesting to follow discussions.

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

#425

Post by aylmao »

ra7 wrote: post #227
Aperocky wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well all of those point seem to sum up to: "We're getting beat by Tiktok and we're going to catch up by being more like tiktok" That doesn't exactly exude confidence.

Didn't they do the same thing when Snapchat took off and then blew it out of the water with Instagram Stories? There is a track record.

There are plenty of parallels with what happened with Snapchat Stories, but I do wonder if it's the "same thing".

Stories are best when created by people you know, and they're easy to create too. They're the type of content that would build off of Instagram's social strengths.

The type of content people consume on TikTok, as far as I understand, is largely made by creators though. This is similar to YouTube; they now even get financial compensation directly for it too [1] (although apparently this compensation is not as good as YouTube's).

This could be a Snapchat vs Instagram Stories situation, or it could be a YouTube vs Facebook Watch / IGTV situation. Facebook has historically been notoriously bad at creating a high-quality video platform, so if that's what it takes to beat TikTok I honestly wouldn't expect Instagram Reels to overtake TikTok anytime soon, especially considering a lot of what I've seen there are random accounts reposting TikTok content (which feels a bit like the type of content Watch became infamous for).

[1]: https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-gb/tiktok-creator-fund-your-q...

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

#426

Post by ohashi »

aierou wrote: post #417
ohashi wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/sep/14/facebook-... https://www.techtransparencyproject.org/articles/white-supre... https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-election-facebook-russia... So outrageous it's easy to find evidence for all of them?

Evidence is a horribly abused term. Do you really believe any of this would admissible in a court of law?

So it went from 'these claims are outrageous' to they wouldn't hold up in a court of law? You're a facebook shill and you're embarrassing yourself. You're not fighting misinformation, you are the disinformation campaign.

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

#427

Post by ryan_lane »

matt_wilson_206 wrote: post #316
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'…

Finally, someone with a similar Facebook experience to my own. I've been reading threads about how horrific the FB feed is for years, but my own is literally 99% updates from friends I don't get to see, and an occasional ad (that is interesting more often than not). Glad to know I'm not completely alone!

I eventually had to delete my Facebook, but I also did what the parent said, but my feed was primarily suggested content, which was mostly videos, and occasionally it would throw in Fox news, or one of the alt-right shills. I think this content is driven by who you're connected to, and I think it ignores your mutes. I have a lot of friends and family in Louisiana. I've lost friends to QAnon.

So, yeah, if we're going with anecdata, then my experience doesn't match yours, even with this approach of trying to highly curate it.

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

#428

Post by zepto »

aierou wrote: post #424
ohashi wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So do you work for facebook or is your only purpose on HN to try to defend the company?

I am interested in the virtual reality space, and started posting because I was frustrated by the spread of misinformation/propaganda. Ironically, there is a lot of misinformation about Facebook. I'm sure my contributions are mostly meaningless, but it has at least been interesting to follow discussions.

Really? What do you think of as misinformation about Facebook?

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

#429

Post by idoh »

skizm wrote: post #385
mathattack wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If a stock is priced at a huge multiple to earnings and sales... FBs P/E ratio was well into the value stock territory of ~22 before this dip. They were trading at the lowest multiple of any other big tech company by far, now they're even more insanely undervalued from a fundamentals perspective. I realize that doesn't matter in the age of the meme stock, but personally I'm still pretty bullish in the long term and…

Agreed. I was looking at them even before this dip. They are valued so low that even if they simply maintain current earnings relative to inflation they are an OK investment.

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

#430

Post by aierou »

ohashi wrote: post #426
aierou wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Evidence is a horribly abused term. Do you really believe any of this would admissible in a court of law?

So it went from 'these claims are outrageous' to they wouldn't hold up in a court of law? You're a facebook shill and you're embarrassing yourself. You're not fighting misinformation, you are the disinformation campaign.

My intentions were clear in my first post - legislation will be the deciding factor. This back and forth is meaningless.
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