Anonymous ID: 562b8e Jan. 30, 2019, 1:18 p.m. No.4967648   🗄️.is đź”—kun

Facebook, Inc. (FB)

 

162.30 +11.39 (7.57%)

After hours: 4:15PM EST

 

Despite yet another terrible headline on privacy, Facebook soared over 4% into the close (highest since Nov 7th) ahead of earnings thanks to Jay Powell's capitulation, and accelerated higher after hours following better than expected earnings, revenues, and daily active users.

 

"Our community and business continue to grow," said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO.

 

"We've fundamentally changed how we run our company to focus on the biggest social issues, and we're investing more to build new and inspiring ways for people to connect."

 

Revenues and earnings beat solidly:

 

*FACEBOOK 4Q REV. $16.91B, EST. $16.39B

*FACEBOOK 4Q EPS $2.38, EST. $2.18

 

And the stock is up 7% after-hours

 

 

Daily active users (DAUs) better than 1.51 billion expected – DAUs were 1.52 billion on average for December 2018, an increase of 9% year-over-year.

 

Monthly active users (MAUs) as expected – MAUs were 2.32 billion as of December 31, 2018, an increase of 9% year-over-year.

 

Mobile advertising revenue – Mobile advertising revenue represented approximately 93% of advertising revenue for the fourth quarter of 2018, up from approximately 89% of advertising revenue in the fourth quarter of 2017.

 

Capital expenditures – Capital expenditures were $4.37 billion and $13.92 billion for the fourth quarter and full year 2018, respectively.

 

Cash and cash equivalents and marketable securities – Cash and cash equivalents and marketable securities were $41.11 billion at the end of the fourth quarter of 2018.

 

Headcount – Headcount was 35,587 as of December 31, 2018, an increase of 42% year-over-year.

 

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-01-30/facebook-soars-after-top-bottom-line-beat-weve-fundamentally-changed

Anonymous ID: 562b8e Jan. 30, 2019, 1:20 p.m. No.4967672   🗄️.is đź”—kun

Microsoft cloud business booms 20%

 

Microsoft (MSFT) on Wednesday reported revenue of $32.5 billion, which was in line with expectations. Earnings per share came in at $1.08 per share versus analysts’ estimates of $1.09 per share. The stock is down 2.5% in after hours trading.

 

Microsoft’s cloud business, the cornerstone of the company’s pivot to cloud computing, raked in $9.4 billion of revenue in the quarter. That’s an increase of 20%.

 

Microsoft’s Productivity and Business processes segment, which includes the company’s Office line of software, saw revenue of $10.1 billion. That’s a jump of 13%.

 

Microsoft’s More Personal Computing business, which includes Windows, saw $13 billion in revenue, a 7% increase.

 

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-q-2-2019-earnings-210601345.html

Anonymous ID: 562b8e Jan. 30, 2019, 1:27 p.m. No.4967759   🗄️.is đź”—kun

So If Half of Facebook Accounts Are Fake… What Is Facebook Worth?

 

The social media space is absolutely ripe for a new entrant who demands arduous verification and constantly monitors its user base to eliminate cloned and fake accounts.

How many accounts on Facebook are fake? Recent estimates of half could be low. Here's an experiment: open a Facebook account with a name that cannot possibly be anyone else's real name, for example, Johns XQR Citizenry. Solicit a few real people to friend you, start posting something original every day and see what happens.

Eventually, your friends will inform you that "Johns XQR Citizenry" solicited them to friend him, even though they're already friends with you. Congratulations, your Facebook identity has been cloned.

When you do a search, you find a half-dozen "Johns XQR Citizenry," and every one of these cloned accounts is completely empty: no photo, no content. They were obviously set up for the sole purpose of cloning your identity to propagate spam to your friends list and then their friends' lists.

So you flag the clone accounts as per Facebook's instructions, and the (automated) response comes back "the account you flagged does not violate our community standards." So in other words, cloning identities on Facebook is just fine.

Next, you try to find some way to report the cloning to Facebook–there's isn't any way.

How difficult would it be for Facebook's vaunted AI screens to identify cloned accounts? Same name, empty account, delete, block the IP. How hard is that?

Then you start getting friends' requests from fake accounts: accounts with a photo of a supposedly legitimate person with a photo or two of a sunset for content and that's all.

These requests from fake accounts soon outnumber the legitimate requests from real people.

Add up the clone accounts and the fake accounts, and one wonders if the total number of fake accounts is more than half of all Facebook accounts. The question that naturally arises is: what's Facebook worth if half or more of its 2.2 billion accounts are fake?

What's Facebook worth when it can't even weed out the most obvious cloned and fake accounts? What's it worth if perhaps it doesn't want to eliminate all those fake accounts?

This raises another question: how can any social media company verify a "real identity" from a fake identity? The only way to do so is to institute a process much like opening an online bank account, a process that requires identification, deposits into an existing account and so on.

 

http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2019/01/so-if-half-of-facebook-accounts-are.html

Anonymous ID: 562b8e Jan. 30, 2019, 1:36 p.m. No.4967880   🗄️.is đź”—kun   >>7945

Tesla, Inc. (TSLA)

307.60 -1.88 (-0.61%)

afterhours

 

Tesla earnings miss expectations, shares slip

 

Tesla (TSLA) posted lower-than-expected earnings in the fiscal fourth quarter but eked out a second consecutive quarter of profitability, underscoring its ongoing struggles to sell affordable electric vehicles at scale.

 

The carmaker delivered adjusted earnings of $1.93 per share for the fourth quarter, falling below consensus estimates of $2.14 per share, according to Bloomberg data. However, fourth-quarter revenue of $7.23 billion slightly exceeded consensus expectations of $7.07 billion.

 

In the year-ago quarter, Tesla posted a loss of $3.04 per share on revenue of $3.29 billion.

 

Based on management’s previous commentary, results for the fiscal first quarter could also come in soft. On Jan. 18, CEO Elon Musk said in a company blog post that shipments of higher-priced Model 3 variants to Europe and Asia in early 2019 would “hopefully allow us, with great difficulty, effort and some luck, to target a tiny profit” in the current quarter.

 

However, the company said in its statement announcing results Wednesday that it expects to have positive GAAP net income and free cash flow in every quarter beyond the fiscal first quarter of 2019.

 

In the fiscal fourth quarter, the company’s free cash flows increased to $910 million, better than the $881 million it had posted in the third quarter. Tesla’s cash and cash equivalents also increased by $718 million from the third quarter to $3.7 billion.

_____

The comment section of yahoo finance is a laugh riot. HODL'ers!!!!!

 

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tesla-fourth-quarter-2018-earnings-results-211719848.html