Notes From All Over -- Part 2 -- February 3, 2022

EVs: yesterday we reported that GM would spend $35 billion on EVs and autonomous driving. 

Later, not to be one-upped, Ford announced it would spend $20 billion on same. Link here. With regard to how little I read on EVs, and how much I know about auto manufacturers, and it's not much, my better is on F of the two major US manufacturers. Globally, I have no idea.

Fracking future: doesn't look good. According to Collin Eaton at The Wall Street Journal.

Link here first to Yahoo!Finance. Not sure if that will get you past the WSJ paywall.

My first thought: this article, or variations thereof, have been re-posted every year for the past fifty years. LOL. I wonder if Collin Eaton saw the Facebook story yesterday? Just saying.

Bad way to start the day: oil production vessel explodes (and sinks) offshore Nigeria overnight. Links everywhere. Not interested.

Police state? Russia? North Korea? China? Nope, Canada. Ready to call in Canadian Armed Forces to end the Ottawa drive-in. Links everywhere. Not interested.

FB: traded at 6.5 times the normal volume. Folks can't dump their FB shares fast enough. Shorts must be loving this. Down 26%. Not 26 points, but 26%. 

Can you imagine that. One of the most-owned companies in the world, and in minutes (yesterday afternoon) it dropped 25%? Wow. The really, really bad news: even those who don't own FB directly will pay:

• "every" mutual fund in the world holds a lot of FB; and,
• FB will drag down every other tech stock.

HODL.

FB is in deep doo-doo. Three reasons:

• TikTok.
• Apple.
• metaverse

None of these will go away in the next three years.  

Add to this list: subscriber growth has maxed out. When you have more than a billion users how can you grow much more? It seems like analysts might have noticed that a bit sooner. Add to this list (which is a subset of TikTok): running out of ways to monetize the platform and, oh by the way, it's very difficult to monetize video (they say -- which I doubt -- YouTube does a great job monetizing their site). It was also noted by the CEO that FB users were finding less expensive ways to access certain apps / features provided by FB. Apparently FB is missing the "price point." 

By the way, folks are so addicted to FB, I wonder why they haven't begun charging a nominal subscription fee with twelve months free and first million subscribers get it for free. Off an easy to monetize your FB page and folks would rush to subscribe and pay a nominal subscription fee.