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A comment on Facebook Declared War on Apple, and It Just May Signal the End of Facebook.

Re:Facebook Declared War on Apple, and It Just May Signal th... by _cs2017_ on Thursday December 24, 2020 @01:39PM (#25530105)
Anyone who can successfully predict downfall of large publicly traded companies can work for a hedge fund and make tens of millions of dollars a year.

Anyone who cannot predict such events can write articles for a magazine claiming otherwise. At least it helps sell their speaking and consulting engagements.

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Re:Facebook Declared War on Apple, and It Just May Signal th... by rapferreira on Thursday December 24, 2020 @02:09PM (#25530393)
It's also pretty naive reasoning. Author thinks a significant enough number of people are going to care? Facebook has survived- no, thrived despite multiple public scandals, some of which were far more substantive than complaining about Apple's privacy policy.
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Re:Facebook Declared War on Apple, and It Just May Signal th... by bonestamp2 on Thursday December 24, 2020 @02:29PM (#25530608)
A few months ago, I would have completely agreed with you. But the number of facebook addicts that I know that have quit facebook recently, are starting to make me rethink my position on this. I know it's just anecdotal, but maybe it's also not.
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Re:Facebook Declared War on Apple, and It Just May Signal th... by rapferreira on Thursday December 24, 2020 @03:18PM (#25531037)
https://www.statista.com/statistics/247614/number-of-monthly...

Maybe we are indeed in the beginning of a trend reversal, but we don't have enough data to support that as far as I know.

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Re:Facebook Declared War on Apple, and It Just May Signal th... by ummonk on Thursday December 24, 2020 @02:07PM (#25530376)
There are limits to what you can do with superior but imperfect knowledge though. E.g. everyone knows Tesla stock is overvalued - even Elon tweets about it. And yet it's not really feasible to profit off this knowledge.
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Re:Facebook Declared War on Apple, and It Just May Signal th... by _cs2017_ on Thursday December 24, 2020 @11:33PM (#25534216)
If you only predict that the stock is overvalued, it may indeed be difficult to exploit that information.

However, in this case, the author predicted the downfall of a huge company. If its business starts failing by any reasonable metric, its stock will fall very fast and very far.

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Re:Facebook Declared War on Apple, and It Just May Signal th... by jeremyjh on Thursday December 24, 2020 @02:21PM (#25530516)
Why is it not feasible to short Tesla?
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Re:Facebook Declared War on Apple, and It Just May Signal th... by epistasis on Thursday December 24, 2020 @02:23PM (#25530545)
The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
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Re:Facebook Declared War on Apple, and It Just May Signal th... by dragonwriter on Thursday December 24, 2020 @02:44PM (#25530758)
Also, long and short positions aren't symmetric, because there is no non-margin way to enter a short position. This makes the ability of the market to stay irrational more likely to go bite you in a short position than a long one, ceteris paribus.
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Re:Facebook Declared War on Apple, and It Just May Signal th... by jeremyjh on Thursday December 24, 2020 @02:26PM (#25530574)
Isn't that a market failure then? If the founder and CEO of the company says the company is over-valued, there should be someone in a position to capitalize on that information.
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Re:Facebook Declared War on Apple, and It Just May Signal th... by epistasis on Thursday December 24, 2020 @02:35PM (#25530659)
Sure, but then so is pretty much every aspect of the stock market, IMHO. It's a tool with all sorts of terrible flaws when it comes to capital allocation. A single company being overvalued without a safe way to bet against mass delusion of the public isn't that large of a flaw compared to the systematic over valuations and under valuations, IMHO.

This isn't to say that it's not without its uses, but we should be aware that it has huge problems even if we don't know of a way to fix them yet.

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Re:Facebook Declared War on Apple, and It Just May Signal th... by neosat on Thursday December 24, 2020 @02:31PM (#25530629)
Not really a failure. It's important to realize that people are not necessarily always paying for the 'actual value of a company' (subjective itself) but for what other agents will be willing to pay for the stock. If that value is higher than the current price, they'll buy.
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Re:Facebook Declared War on Apple, and It Just May Signal th... by dragonwriter on Thursday December 24, 2020 @02:48PM (#25530791)
> Isn't that a market failure then?

By definition, every non-ideal behavior of real markets is a “market failure”.

Real markets, as opposed to Econ 101 idealized ones, are full of market failures, both due to structures that Econ 101-level analysis ignores about basic market structures and human irrationality.

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Re:Facebook Declared War on Apple, and It Just May Signal th... by sharkweek on Thursday December 24, 2020 @02:27PM (#25530591)
I know a lot of people meme about the Reddit Wall Street Bets community, but if you want to see a stream of people losing money trying to guess TSLA’s downfall, that’s a good place to start.

There are also lots of examples there of people gambling on TSLA shooting to the moon and making a killing this year.

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Re:Facebook Declared War on Apple, and It Just May Signal th... by neosat on Thursday December 24, 2020 @02:24PM (#25530556)
Because it assumes a rational market. And the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
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Re:Facebook Declared War on Apple, and It Just May Signal th... by pksebben on Thursday December 24, 2020 @02:27PM (#25530585)
who is this a quote of? seems like common knowledge here.
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Re:Facebook Declared War on Apple, and It Just May Signal th... by grzm on Thursday December 24, 2020 @02:30PM (#25530621)
Often attributed to Keynes, though it looks like it was likely Gary Shilling:

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/08/09/remain-solvent/

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Re:Facebook Declared War on Apple, and It Just May Signal th... by pksebben on Thursday December 24, 2020 @11:19PM (#25534156)
Thanks for the good refs!
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Re:Facebook Declared War on Apple, and It Just May Signal th... by neosat on Thursday December 24, 2020 @02:28PM (#25530599)
I believe John Maynard Keynes
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Re:Facebook Declared War on Apple, and It Just May Signal th... by bryanrasmussen on Thursday December 24, 2020 @02:23PM (#25530541)
because you don't have a good idea as to when they will stop being overvalued?
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Re:Facebook Declared War on Apple, and It Just May Signal th... by mushufasa on Thursday December 24, 2020 @02:24PM (#25530551)
"markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent"
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Re:Facebook Declared War on Apple, and It Just May Signal th... by iamacyborg on Thursday December 24, 2020 @02:24PM (#25530555)
Same reason it’s not been profitable to short them for the last 3 years.
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Re:Facebook Declared War on Apple, and It Just May Signal th... by DaiPlusPlus on Thursday December 24, 2020 @02:24PM (#25530552)
You’d need to be a “long-term short” - which is difficult to pull-off.
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Re:Facebook Declared War on Apple, and It Just May Signal th... by progit on Thursday December 24, 2020 @02:11PM (#25530426)
SOTP suggests FB investors at around $180-$200 could make out nicely even if they split Instagram and Whatsapp. I don’t think there’s a lot of synergy among those three core businesses. In fact, Instagram would be worth a lot more independently (just as Youtube would be worth more operating alone). This is to say not a lot of downside as people may expect from Political scrutiny forthcoming. My two cents.
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Re:Facebook Declared War on Apple, and It Just May Signal th... by gtCameron on Thursday December 24, 2020 @02:23PM (#25530547)
Not a lot of synergy from the end user’s perspective, but the value of those platforms is the advertising network, which is a massive synergy for Facebook operating all three platforms and owning all three audiences. I don’t know how exactly a split would work but I see more downside than upside to having to recreate the ad network on each platform.
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Re:Facebook Declared War on Apple, and It Just May Signal th... by gnzoidberg on Thursday December 24, 2020 @01:55PM (#25530264)
Completely agree. That title is so stupid that I wish I could "killfile" that author from all my web news feeds.
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Re:Facebook Declared War on Apple, and It Just May Signal th... by ubercow13 on Thursday December 24, 2020 @02:08PM (#25530385)
You'd need a few prescient articles under your belt before the hedge fund would hire you, though.
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Re:Facebook Declared War on Apple, and It Just May Signal th... by heyflyguy on Thursday December 24, 2020 @01:59PM (#25530290)
this is wisdom
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