Here Come The Banker Estimates For Facebook

The 40 day silent period the brokers and investment banks are held to after an IPO will end today for Facebook. Tomorrow morning you’ll see a flood of research reports, estimates, price targets, and ratings from these guys. It’s highly unlikely that you’re going to see any massively negative reports.

Given the troubles Facebook is having at monetizing an increasing percentage of mobile traffic, issues around its Facebook Credits program (nixed), games on its platform that are less sticky than once thought, and an alarming trend of decreasing growth in user engagement metrics, continued revenue growth of 40+% is unlikely.

Given those issues, some of which were revealed a bit late in the IPO game to a certain Morgan Stanley analyst (cough…cough), you can bet dollars to doughnuts that most of these estimates are going to be softballs that the company can hit during its next earnings release. The current Wall Street consensus of 11 analysts from some smaller firms is for .15c EPS, but more importantly 1.18B in revenues for the quarter.

And while another two dozen or so analysts from Wall Street will share estimates, on Estimize there are already 160 buy side and independent analysts who have shared theirs. Below is the scatter plot of community estimates who’s consensus is currently at .12c EPS and 1.16B in revenue, quite a bit lower than Wall Street. We’ll find out tomorrow where the rest of Wall Street stands, but at the end of the day, given their obvious skew and conflicts of interest, do their numbers even matter now that we have the Estimize consensus?

click on image to share your estimate

 

Full Disclosure: Nothing on this site should ever be considered to be advice, research or an invitation to buy or sell any securities, please see the Disclaimer page for a full disclaimer.


blog comments powered by Disqus