Quote from: The Pharmacist on August 12, 2018, 06:43:08 PM

Quote from: lilli_stitch on August 12, 2018, 06:32:15 PM

Facebook posted shitty gains and much lower than expected new users. People are going elsewhere because it's a dead platform.

I like your attitude.

Looks like FB rebounded somewhat and is now $180. As I said in a previous post, I don't watch FB like I did when it first came out and I was surprised when I took a look at it recently--it has a P/E of about 28. While Warren Buffet might not touch a stock with a multiple that high, it's nowhere near where I thought it was. Facebook actually has decent earnings, and I own some stocks with higher P/Es than where FB is at. When you think about how insane the internet stock boom of the 90s and early '00s was, FB isn't in that same category. Very, very few of those old internet companies had any earnings at all. Some of them didn't even have any revenue, just a stupid business plan that appealed to the venture capitalists!

That said, there's no way I'd buy FB stock. I'm not sure they're going to die, because I still see a lot of people who can't pry their eyes away from their smartphones because they're on Facebook. There's definitely that addictive quality there that you find in products like tobacco, and there's a lot to be said for that. Plus I think they're expanding the scope of their business through some acquisitions if I'm not mistaken. The bottom line is that they don't pay a dividend and may never. Most tech companies don't, which means you don't get any income from owning the stock. That's distasteful to me.

Yeah if I wanted something that didn't pay dividends I'd buy futures contracts on commodities. It's quite pointless to be spending so much on stocks and not get anything back but speculation.

One other thing I saw today is the government is looking to get Facebook to break their encryption for criminal probes, which got me thinking that a lot of the speculative money behind them is probably coming from government associates. They're probably being propped up as they are the most valuable source of information available these days.

But they have been diversifying, for sure. Instagram is the new social media of choice, which they own. Advertisers prefer it too, so they must be getting lots of revenue from it.