Last week was a deeply unpleasant one for Facebook shareholders, with the stock losing over $60 billion (€48.65 billion) in market value following its worst two-day sell-off in over five years. Revelations regarding Cambridge Analytica’s use of Facebook users’ data during the 2016 US election scandal has clearly shaken investors, but Facebook still has two important factors – trend and valuation – in its favour. Facebook has trounced the wider market in recent years and last week’s correction represents a mere dent in that outperformance. Or will Facebook users and investors quickly move on? Perhaps the biggest risk for shareholders isn’t that users will desert it en masse but that regulators decide technology behemoths like Facebook have become too dominant.

Source: The Irish Times March 27, 2018 06:56 UTC