regaining close to all of yesterdays losses: https://seekingalpha.com/news/333997...app=1&uprof=49

made a bit but need to work on my conviction. Could get 5-10x here easily if I could pull the trigger

Nice call dude. SEED had way more follow through than RKDA. RKDA looks like it could go full DRYS at anytime.

In other words it was political spam as it doesn’t have anything to do with any trading positions you have or are recommending.

I was surprised how well futures held up overnight given the considerable build up of headline risk over the weekend, the FB story is a huge drag on tech but I actually think the nullification of the QCOM/AVGO proposal is just as meaningful as it puts significant risk on future M&A not just in chips but the whole sector. Regulatory issues for FB don't seem to be a problem compared to people not trusting the platform the way they used to (sort of like what happened to CMG). You usually see an M&A boom to end a bull cycle and protectionism and potential social media regulation do not help this thesis despite how it may have looked only a few months ago.

The Trump administration has been rather anti-merger in general, which is rather surprising. See RAD, CVS and Olehausen's remarks on those mergers. The new DoJ antitrust appointee, Delrahim, also seems to take a rather dim view on mergers in general.

Brian goes long but is the ultimate short caller. Spot on when the **** is about to hit fan and when it's probably a buy the dip. Hasn't been wrong so far.

I'm getting more and more data points that people should be doing tihe opposite of what their modus operandi/comfort zone is - permabears make the best bulls, you have no interest in getting long unless it's an amazing opportunity. And vol sellers make the best shorts.

I've owned NXPI & TWX for a couple years & honestly didn't expect the headache holding on has been. Also got burned a bit on RAD. Expected with a Republican president and congress that deals would be basically free money unless they were truly monopolistic but it just goes to show how silly that idea was/is.

The Time Warner-AT&T deal should be allowed to go through, I think the government's case is as thin as possible. It's up to AT&T when they acquire Turner networks/HBO what they want to charge for their content, consumers have more choices than ever if they find better value elsewhere. The market should be able to decide whether that's fair or not, Comcast seems to have no problem with its NBC Universal properties. Again the argument isn't whether consumers will be happy with the result but legally does it make the market anti competitive and I think it's clear that it doesn't. I could simply claim YouTube/Twitch are sucking ad/subscriber dollars away for the next couple generations and there is plenty of data to support that.

Thanks, but I know my own track record with calling the market short. It is unimpressive.

Thoughts on FB? This is insane.. seems way overdone.

I'm definitely stalking it for a trade but I wouldn't recommend adding yet or starting a new position. Still considerable headline risk even if a lot of it turns out to be noise for the future. The truth is advertising dollars have to go somewhere, the idea that companies are going to significantly pullback their FB & broader digital spending is complete nonsense. Where is it going? Linear TV, magazines and/or radio? Maybe ad spending ends up declining overall and FB/GOOG start ceding some of their duopoly (names here would be AMZN, MSFT, TWTR, SNAP but as you can see the latter two haven't performed well the last couple days as well) but the secular trends are still secure even with the risk of regulation. The crown jewel of FB is Instagram anyways, sure the main platform is still the biggest driver of profits but for the future I wouldn't want to bet against how much money still has to shift from traditional mediums that continue to be disrupted.

Facebook is maturing but then again it's not exactly a new property in the history of the internet/social media either. The valuation reflects that which is why this could end up being a fantastic overreaction for those with some patience willing to scale in. But still for those of us who believe in technicals, the last couple days are pretty bearish short term so I'm in no rush to get involved other than playing for a quick hitter. Vol is elevated, the market is pretty fragile... If you have a price you'd love to own it then just sell longer term puts but I'd personally like to see it try to carve out a bottom first. You are below the lows from February, it's not going to be a V recovery especially with few good catalysts on the horizon.

I would been sympathetic to a bottom until this news came in this morning:

'Utterly horrifying': ex-Facebook insider says covert data harvesting was routine

The cool kids all shorted on this. FTC investigation news added a little fear too.

Facebook is a company that sells detailed intensely private data to third parties for high prices. That's their business model and it drives the premium of their ads. This blowup is big enough to hurt trust in their company and more importantly open them up to regulation. EU for example is such a ****up region and so big on privacy and regulation that every website in the world need to explicitly ask you for permission to use a cookie if you're based in the EU. They're big on privacy and could hit FB very with fines or regulate them, and this is a perfect excuse. They're already hitting these companies for antitrust, talking with seriousness about taxing big tech companies on revenue...3-7% I think, which is a lot of money. This is a perfect excuse to push that all through. It's really not good for FB, and FB is already priced for perfection.

It's really not priced for perfection imo whatever that means. They've grown into their valuation as much as any company since they've ipo'd. It can get cheaper for sure but is it expensive given their revenue and growth (even as it decelerates)? I guess that depends on how expensive you think their peers/the market is.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/20/wall...valuation.html

Analysts are staying pat or buying the dip for FB.
Rather remarkable that there isn’t a single downgrade

when you look at FB you have to look at the market as a whole imo. buying here could be trying to swim upstream. i think fang makes up something like 20% of qqq. that means just about every major fund is holding a position. enormous positions could be trimmed. FB p/e is still higher than aapl. chartists cant be thrilled with the overall market either (right?)

on a longer view you have a handful of stocks making up an absurd portion of a market at record highs. the enormous amount of wealth in a small number of names/hands is risky to begin with. then on top of it, its tech. disruption will happen. if i were looking for a spot to buy FB i would probably look for it to start going back up and take on a momentum type strategy

JV, it is common for the stock market to be led by a handful of stocks (meaning the top 5 stocks being as big as the bottom 250 in the S&P). Your point about it being a market stock is well put, even within tech you still have plenty of outperformance off the February lows and obviously FB is now one of the biggest laggards. The chips for instance have quite a few names at or right below 52w highs (MU, WDC, INTC, not AMD though which makes me happy as well .

ASAP, I'll gladly agree that FB isn't NFLX and there's a decent "value" case to be made there within the context of the inflated market.

Still. You need 20 years (50 years after the risk free rate) to get your money back if you buy FB, and it assumes they will continue to grow unregulated with their current private-data-selling and person-tracking activities. That latter assumption was weakened a lot today. Maybe with 20% probability that something bad enough will happen to meaningfully hit their long term bottom line. So a correction on this is certainty due and I don't think this is an overreaction.

Still, nearly every analyst has this a buy and are still pumping it today, so that adds bottom strength.

FB PR is selling this as an isolated incident. Just released a statement:

So the future of the stock depends on whether that earlier is true.

My preference after this press release is to buy the dip.

Up 27% today. buyout rumors i guess. I never bought it bc of valuation.

buyout confirmed actually, cash+stock in CRM

Yeah, the initial notion of this article can mask the subject matter here.

I heard that you can make tons of money doing the opposite of whatever ToothSayer advises, but I really don't think actually having to read his posts makes it worth it.

no one cares - go back to politics forum

A Disney to Netflix comparison is interesting ATM. DIS has been trading sideways for three years, $104 three years ago (when SPY was at 207) while NFLX was @ 58. Now Netflix's Market Cap is ready to surpass Disney.

Think about how dumb this makes you sound.