The market moves on Twitter are also in line with the surprisingly vague theory that the market is repositioning towards economic recovery stocks. That, however, is to put it mildly premature, particularly in the United States.
The economic recovery is still on life support, trying to breathe with a massive pandemic still raging, vaccines or no vaccines. It’ll take months for the US economy to recover after the vax program, and the program will also take months, if not years.
Even so – Twitter (NASDAQ:TWTR) and Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) both took significant hits over the last week, with progressive downside. The question is whether the market has months’ worth of attention span.
I don’t buy the theory that Twitter has suddenly devalued itself by removing Trump, if that’s the reason. The big downside for Twitter is also a beat-up in relative values. The stock is still very close to a 10 month high. So, O Noble NASDAQ, what’s the problem?
Conventional wisdom says that the market overbuys and oversells, but this level of sage market wisdom is highly debatable. Both Twitter and Facebook are under significant pressure for different reasons, but they’re also now very much part of the market environment. They’re markets of themselves. They’re selling for everyone. Social media is where everyone is, most of the time. It’s where news breaks. It’s where the political neuroses happen.
The companies may change; they will evolve. Twitter in particular is the go-to place for a lot of information. All journalists and commentators follow it. Two months ago Twitter went up from under $40 to $55 as the pandemic went out of control. Now it’s not a good deal? Come off it.
The Trump vs Twitter factor.
If the removal of Trump and his dubious numbers of followers is a factor, it shouldn’t be. Trump’s Twitter numbers are pretty vague at best. Trump’s Twitter stats have never made statistical sense. For someone with so many supposed fanatical followers, he rarely got anything like the millions of hits he should have.
My view of this is that Trump wasn’t that much of an asset to Twitter. I checked out his Twitter numbers back in July 2019. I didn’t believe them, and I seemed to be right. Not a lot of those numbers looked good, or reliable. A lot of his claims for followers didn’t stack up at all.
Manipulation of Twitter numbers isn’t unknown. I used to know a guy who said he could get 10,000 likes anytime he wanted. Nor is market manipulation. The same market “logic” that says the entire global oil sector is in trouble if a single pipe in Nigeria bursts for a day might be at work on valuing post-Trump Twitter.
To me, that’s not a valuation of a stock. It’s a joke. Well?