The market focused community of which I am a part has a tendency to parse every wrinkle in information and price behavior.
When we are involved with the trade, especially, we can get so close up, so tuned in to each detail, that it becomes difficult for us to recognize the much larger trends or broader implications of those trends as they unfold.
Nowehere is this more true than with $FB and, perhaps, some of the other social stocks like $YELP and $LNKD.
$FB, in particular, began trading earlier this year with huge fanfair and then the dissapointing price behavior became the well from which the media and market participants quenched.
This brings me to Clay Allsopp’s wonderful blog post titled Growing Old on Facebook. It begins,
There’s an entire generation where every photo, message, post, idea between adolescence and adulthood is cataloged on Facebook. Just click on the most recent picture and tap your left arrow key to see.
Wrinkles vanish, beards recede, and bodies contract and expand into the past. There’s all the embarrassing haircuts, forgotten friends, parties, love, heartbreak, it’s all there waiting to be rediscovered. New moments pile up every day, just itching for our future selves to find again.
Social tools are changing the way we relate with others and with ourselves over time, no doubt, and its a considerable shift. I bring this up completely apart from discounted cash flow models, chart patterns or sentiment analysis, but also to be contextualized within our theses as it is also a crucial part of an evaluation of $FB and these other names.
Head on over to Clay’s blog and read the rest of his excellent and well timed piece.