Two analysts warned today that the social network giant could fail to live up to Wall Street’s financial expectations — which contributed to a 2.4% drop in the share price. It closed at $20.40, which is down 8.4% over the last four days. BTIG’s Richard Greenfield downgraded shares to “sell” from “neutral” with a $16 price target. He warned that Facebook’s effort to include ads and other services designed to generate sales could backfire. They’re cluttering people’s news feeds with ads that are “relatively generic…with very little targeting and with a very low bar in terms of the level of creativity Facebook requires,” Greenfield says. “To make matters worse, we increasingly see brands violating Facebook’s social mission by deceptively trying to acquire Likes, so they can target you and all your friends going forward.”
Meanwhile, Pivotal Research Group’s Brian Wieser — who has a “buy” on the stock — lowered his target price to $28 from $32 over concerns that Facebook could suffer from the new disclosures of weakness at game maker Zynga. He had forecast that Facebook would see about $5B in 2017 from non-advertising sources including Zynga games such as FarmVille and CityVille. But Wieser just reduced that projection to $3.4B. What’s more, he says, if Facebook’s Q3 revenues don’t beat Wall Street expectations then “we see enhanced short-term risk.” Many shareholders “may now be more likely to fear for the worst given the broader disaster at Zynga (where by now that stock’s value has collapsed to barely more than the cash on its balance sheet) and sell more [Facebook] shares than they otherwise would have.”


Let’s just put it out there. You set fire fire to your money when you bought Facebook at the IPO price.
I know Zuckerberg recently said he was holding onto his stock options until at least February, I believe. Anyone know how much he actually made off the IPO or if the majority of his fortune is still tied up in Facebook, in which case it looks like he may be heading for Bruce Wayne status if he doesn’t stop pissing off users until they disable their accounts (like he did to me).
I believe the majority is tied up in his facebook stock. I read a recent report on CNN that said he owns 444 million shares with an option to buy 60 million more. So at IPO price of $38 his 444 million shares were worth 16.87 billion… those same 444 million today closed at $20 for a total of 8.88 billion… still a lot of money but that’s a lot of Billions lost.
I find it truly fascinating how these pseudo analysts talk out of their asses.
If anyone here had used facebook ads in the past, they would know how ridiculous these statements are. Facebook targeting delivers CTR higher than Adwords.
It is funny how everybody thinks Facebook is going to be Myspace a year from now, a billion users is a billion users and for all of its criticism Facebook is still a great website (and the best social networking out there) that is on everyone’s phone.
Keep shorting, I’ll be laughing on the way up.
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