Mad Hedge Technology Letter
May 22, 2018
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(THE BIG WINNERS IN THE SPORTS BETTING DECISION),
(LSE:PPB), (LSE:WMH), (LSE:888), (BYD), (IGT), (SGMS)
Up to my elbows in the market for the past 50 years, I have seen my share of paradigm shifts transforming the world and markets with it.
The Supreme Court delivered another momentous decision overturning the 1992 decision to ban sports betting in most states.
The aftermath is decisively pro-business with a profusion of domestic and international winners that can bask in the glow of a future windfall swelling the industry coffers to the tune of $150 billion per year.
The estimated amount of illicit sports gambling activity that goes unreported is $150 billion, and that will migrate to official channels, but I bet the sum is vastly higher.
Sports betting is as American as apple pie.
This is highly evident each year with the NCAA men's basketball tournament sucking in eyeballs resulting in more than $5 billion in lost worker productivity.
The annual Super Bowl is practically an institution in this country as well as quarterback Tom Brady's starting spot on Super Bowl Sunday.
Not only is this ruling pro-business, but the verdict is another overwhelming win for technology and the state of Nevada.
Nevada was one of the few states to receive an exemption from the 1992 ruling, and its sports betting books have developed uninterrupted for the past 26 years.
The 26-year head start will mirror Amazon's seven-year head start in the cloud catapulting existing operations to the top of the food chain.
Sports team owners from all the major sports leagues are jumping with joy as the team valuations of each franchise received another boost with fresh capital pouring in like an overflowing dam.
This development effectively creates a digital sports industry operating parallel to the official leagues and will have business synergies galore.
Sports leagues are about to welcome a new tidal wave of viewer interest that seeks to capitalize on the new synergies.
Options derivative contracts on sports games could be another product down the road for this budding industry.
The two best tech companies in position to take the court ruling and turn it into material business are the leading fantasy sports providers DraftKings and FanDuel, which are both private companies.
In 2016, these two companies attempted a merger that would have given the company a 90% monopolistic market share and more than 5 million customers.
The following year, the Supreme Court blocked the merger as DraftKings continued to grow in excess of 8 million users.
Fantasy sports and the entire e-sports genre is experiencing skyrocketing popularity with youth (physical) sports participation falling off a cliff.
New York-based FanDuel and Boston-based DraftKings have a wide-reaching digital footprint in fantasy sports that is supported by rich tech architecture.
The abundance of tech capabilities will make the crossover into sport wagering seamless.
NumberFire, a sports big data company, was bought up by FanDuel in 2015, and has close to 1 million subscribers parsing through its analytics.
The sports big data movement was christened by Bill James who coined the study of statistics in baseball as sabermetrics. That was the platform used by the Oakland Athletics' General Manager Billy Beane that later developed into a movie and book called Moneyball written by Michael Lewis starring Brad Pitt.
FanDuel was able to poach an entire team of sports tech developers when Zynga 365 Sports went bust after a few sports titles failed to stick and FanDuel picked up 38 of the 42 leftover developers in 2015.
DraftKings has pounced its increasing headcount from 425 to 700 at its Boston headquarters taking advantage of the new legislation to ramp up the required staff.
Plundering talent across the pond, too, leaving no stone unturned is a statement of intent.
DraftKings anointed Sean Hurley, who cut his teeth as head of U.K. B2B sports betting technology supplier Amelco and niche online sports book Whale Global, as its new head of sportsbook.
Tapping the U.K. for sports tech talent makes sense.
The U.K. legalized sports betting in 1961. The Brits bet more than $20 billion last year.
There is an affluence of sports betting tech know-how for hire in Europe. American companies would be naive not to pursue staff reinforcements at a time when companies are fortifying talent levels.
Thus, opening up an extensive market full of sports-crazed fans gives U.K. firms a tasty new opportunity to pursue with existing foundations in place.
Upon the announcement, online sports book outfit 888 Holdings (LSE:888) exploded 15% on the London Stock Exchange.
It's subsidiary 888sport was the first foreign company to receive a license to operate by the Nevada Gaming Commission in 2013.
Paddy Power Betfair (LSE:PPB), based in Dublin, is another company poised to benefit and has launched a takeover bid for FanDuel to seize further gains in market share.
Discussions are ongoing.
This all comes after buying U.S. headquartered Draft, a fantasy sports rival, for $48 million.
There are obvious synergies between fantasy sports and sports betting as they both process ample amounts of data that help set the odds for each game.
Online sports betting is another industry that is waiting for Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) to enhance the betting products, creating a plethora of new business opportunities.
British firms use the same in-game add-on product strategy that is popular with e-gaming franchises such as Fortnite.
In-game bets allow gamblers to wager on specific events within a game such as the first scorer of a soccer match or the first player to receive a yellow card.
Niche betting has proved hugely popular.
Paddy Power has already made inroads in America with a horseracing and greyhound racing TV channel and sportsbook called TVG and an online casino in the state of New Jersey.
Cross-border talent poaching will heat up as premium dollars are up for grabs favoring the first movers that can retain business.
The last clear-cut U.K. winner is William Hill (LSE:WMH), which already has an outsized presence in America by way of its purchase of three Nevadan sports books: Lucky, Leroy's, and Club Cal Neva, for a grand total of $53 million.
The deal gave William Hill an 11% market share of sports book revenues in Nevada. The British bookmaker's sports book can be seen dotted all over Las Vegas and Reno thoroughfares.
CEO of William Hill, Philip Bowcock chimed in saying America will benefit with an injection of "100,000 new jobs" stateside, and consumer safety will increase with the need to bet under the table swept into the dustbin of history.
The U.S.-based fantasy sports powerhouses, U.K.-based sports betting sites, and the State of Nevada are the unwavering victors.
The last stratum of indirect winners are the companies that manufacture sports betting equipment.
No doubt that states will likely set up brick-and-mortar sports betting establishments. Companies such as Boyd Gaming (BYD), Scientific Games Corporation (SGMS), and International Game Technology (IGT) could see a nice revenue bump stemming from the equipment they manufacture.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
Quote of the Day
"Cybersecurity is not only a question of developing defensive technologies but offensive technologies, as well," said President of the United States Donald J. Trump.
Mad Hedge Technology Letter
May 21, 2018
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(HERE'S THE BIGGEST TECHNOLOGY CONTRACT IN HISTORY)
(AMZN), (MSFT), (ORCL), (IBM), (GOOGL)
The return of the Jedi is coming.
Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi will enter the cloud and use the force.
Not the Jedi of the famous George Lucas films, but JEDI - Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure commissioned by the Department of Defense.
This large contract is up for grabs.
Rumor has it that Amazon is in the driver's seat to become the government's right-hand man.
The purpose of this broad-based upgrade is to enhance communication channels among military branches by loading up operations into the cloud.
Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) and machine learning will be integrated as well.
One task slated for modernization includes the heaps of documents waiting to be translated from Arabic, Farsi, Chinese and other foreign languages into English.
A.I. will organize which documents have priority over others as well as aiding in raw translation. This will save the Department of Defense's overworked linguists thousands of hours in brute translation work.
As it stands, the government is grappling with an overlapping fractious system with legacy software up to 20 years old.
These legacy systems of yore are poor at keeping out the cyber criminals looking for a smash-and-data grab.
One instance where massive inefficiencies rear its ugly head is in the Department of Agriculture.
This department has 22 chief information officers that require seven more personal assistants inflating the IT budget.
The government could become the best turnaround story in the tech industry in years.
This turnaround could eventually become bigger than Microsoft and Cisco, which are the poster children for extreme cosmetic surgery in Silicon Valley.
The government burns $90 billion per year servicing IT operations, and JEDI is slated to offer an attractive sum of $100 billion over 10 years to a private company.
Not only will the Department of Defense modernize, but every part of the government will adopt new technologies.
Security is a priority for this administration after its legitimacy was questioned due to alleged nefarious Russian involvement.
The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) has buckled down rejecting a myriad of attempted foreign takeovers of cutting-edge tech companies stressing the need to properly harness local tech companies' ingenuity to the benefit of the country.
These new opportunities do not affect the already $1 billion per quarter that Alphabet (GOOGL) takes in from government servicing.
The $1 billion contract was given to Alphabet to develop the Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team industrially working on Project Maven.
Project Maven is the Department of Defense's attempt to integrate A.I. and machine learning into motion detector technology applied to surveillance drones using the Google cloud.
Project Maven received an additional boost to its objectives with an additional $100 million cash injection recently underlining the government's efforts to make warfare more efficient and less expensive.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has also carved out a nice $5 billion per quarter business thanks to the power brokers in Washington.
Another side deal consummated recently has thrust Microsoft into the frame as well.
Microsoft (MSFT) agreed with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to service 17 intelligence agencies with the Microsoft Azure cloud platform.
The deal was reported to be valued at "hundreds of million" of dollars.
Another separate deal agreed by both parties has Microsoft migrating another 3.4 million users and 4 million devices from the Department of Defense into the cloud.
All told, Microsoft has pulled in more than $1.3 billion of orders from the government in the past five years.
Bill Gates's old company was rewarded certification to supply the government with computers, operating systems, Microsoft Office, and the cloud services bolstering their credentials to potentially extract more government business.
The administration has adopted a winner takes all approach to the JEDI contract preferring one cloud provider to maintain the infrastructure.
Companies are scratching and clawing to get within a shout of winning this valuable revenue stream that could extrapolate down the road.
JEDI accounts for just 20% of the cloud possibilities for the tech companies in the government system.
The further 80% of digitization will happen down the road.
Firms are up in arms about the single platform solution and believe branching out to multiple platforms will come in use if part of the operation goes down.
Hybrid solutions are the norm for 80% of Fortune 500 companies.
As it is, International Business Machines Corp. (IBM), Oracle (ORCL), Alphabet, Amazon (AMZN), and Microsoft have been adamant that they are the best candidates for the job.
Amazon has been on a one-man mission mobilizing its all-star team of lobbyists to gain an edge.
Amazon has been part of the government's purse strings for quite some time.
It was awarded a $600 million contract in 2013.
Secretary of Defense James Mattis spoke about the relationship with Amazon in glowing terms characterizing Amazon's performance as "impressive" in terms of securing data and functionality.
The positive Amazon feedback has given AWS a head start. It hopes to capitalize on the biggest transfer of data to the cloud in modern history.
Once completed, departments will at last be able to access files from different branches on the same platform. This process is currently done manually.
Quickening the pace of modernization is a prerogative for the new administration.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order to spur on the process of getting rid of the decaying system.
Son-in-law Jared Kushner has also been an advocate of the agonizing overhaul.
This bold initiative ties in well with enhancing cybersecurity inside Washington at a time when hackers have penetrated legacy systems with ease.
Getting the White House up and running will improve the operation of the government. From an investor's point of view, it will add materially to the bottom line of companies that start to win more contracts.
This underscores the reliance of our government and economy on the large cap tech companies that are single-handedly propping up the current bull market.
The White House will wake up one day and understand that technology innovation is more powerful than ever, and even the mayhem inside the White House can't stop the digitization of politics.
Going forward Amazon and Microsoft should get a healthy boost to their overflowing coffers. Legacy companies such as IBM and Oracle could be punished by the government as well as investors for being legacy companies, which could lead the government to pass over IBM and Oracle.
Yes Mr. President ... An Upgrade Is Needed
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
Quote of the Day
"What would I do? I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders." - said Michael Dell in 1997, the founder of Dell Technologies, when asked what he would do if he was in charge of Apple.
Mad Hedge Technology Letter
May 18, 2018
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(THE HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY),
(COME MEET JOHN THOMAS AT HIS GLOBAL STRATEGY LUNCHEONS)
Come join me for lunch at the Mad Hedge Fund Trader's Global Strategy Updates, which I will be conducting in and around the U.S. during the week of June 11-15, 2018. For exact dates, please look at the listing calendar below.
Each luncheon will include an excellent meal followed by a wide-ranging discussion and an extended question-and-answer period.
I'll be giving you my up-to-date view on stocks, bonds, currencies, commodities, precious metals, and real estate. And to keep you in suspense, I'll be throwing a few surprises out there, too.
I'll be arriving at 11:30 AM, and leaving late in case anyone wants to have a one-on-one discussion, or just sit around and chew the fat about the financial markets.
Each lunch will be held at an exclusive downtown private club. The precise location will be emailed with your purchase confirmation.
I look forward to meeting you and thank you for supporting my research.
To purchase tickets for the luncheons, click on our online store.
LUNCHEONS:
MONDAY, JUNE 11, 2018, FORT WORTH, TX, GLOBAL STRATEGY LUNCHEON
TUESDAY, JUNE 12, 2018, NEW ORLEANS, LA, GLOBAL STRATEGY LUNCHEON
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 13, 2018, PHILADELPHIA, PA, GLOBAL STRATEGY LUNCHEON
THURSDAY, JUNE 14, 2018, NEW YORK, NY, GLOBAL STRATEGY LUNCHEON
FRIDAY, JUNE 15, 2018, DENVER, CO, GLOBAL STRATEGY LUNCHEON
Mad Hedge Technology Letter
May 17, 2018
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(NVIDIA NAILS IT AGAIN)
(NVDA), (ZTE), (GOOGL), (AMD)
No one does it better than Nvidia (NVDA).
Fetch a measuring stick from the cupboard, gauge the levels of innovation around Silicon Valley, and Nvidia's name floats straight to the top of the list.
Nvidia has it all and more.
Not many firms can brandish one of the best CEOs in all of tech.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is a true visionary.
When he hops on earnings calls, investors and analysts rejoice about the breadth of innovation percolating through the corridors in Santa Clara, CA.
Nvidia was able to increase quarterly revenue by an eye-popping 61% YOY. And this company is one of the quintessential growth companies in tech.
Huang is one of the few CEOs confident enough to talk all the way through the earnings call like he is talking about the back of his hand.
Most CEOs delegate to the CFO after a carefully choreographed introductory statement.
He knows everything about the company and is not afraid to go into detail.
The past few weeks have been hell for chip companies.
The cascade of downgrades undercut momentum with chip shares prices falling across the board.
Every nonsensical downgrade has proved unjustified with chip earnings displaying the robust potency that only FANGs can replicate.
Delve into Nvidia's latest performance and two parts of the business have gone into overdrive.
Gaming has burst to the forefront providing a sturdy pillar to Nvidia's income stream.
Fortunately, crypto mining and e-gamers are dual drivers fueling a rapidly expanding market.
In Q1, crypto miners and e-gamers faced a hysterical "scarcity" of high grade GPU hardware.
To make matters worse, Apple and Samsung are using the same memory as graphic cards.
These two global giants front ran other companies agreeing pricier per unit contracts to guarantee sufficient supply for their product lineup.
This led to a huge famine or feast environment to secure the necessary components.
Huang has ensured investors that Nvidia is moving mountains to meet demand and he hopes prices will "normalize" in the upcoming quarter.
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is the other player producing GPU chips that is experiencing a demand overload.
On the last sell-off, AMD dropped as low as 9.50 and was the perfect entry point into a great company led by Lisa Su, PhD.
AMD continued to bounce off the $9 handle and is trading at $13 after an outstanding earnings report.
Huang also caveated his hopes of chip prices normalizing by saying the "pent-up demand" could get worse because of the unbelievable gaming options in the market, such as blowout title Fortnite and popular online game Player Unknown's Battlegrounds that have sold more than 40 million copies throughout various platforms.
Nvidia has caught the innovation bug with new products coming off the conveyer belt sooner than expected.
Nvidia has announced NVIDIA RTX, the "holy grail" of graphic performance that will offer gamers Hollywood cinematic production quality lighting, reflections, and shadows.
This product has been in the works for the past 10 years and has gamers and miners drooling over this new technology called ray tracing.
Revenue from crypto miners is not a part of Nvidia's core mission, and the stronger than expected numbers are just the beginning.
If bitcoin takes another stab at $20,000, GPU demand will go through the roof.
As the price of cryptocurrencies rise, the profit-making opportunities to mine are greatly enhanced.
Another division running on all cylinders showing no sign of slowing down is the data center segment.
Initially, this industry was tabbed by Nvidia as a $30 billion opportunity by 2020.
They were completely wrong.
Nvidia moved the goal posts and announced at a recent investors day that it believes data center revenue will be a $50 billion market by 2023.
Data center revenue spiked 71% YOY to $701 million highlighting the innovation leadership Nvidia enjoys.
The data center incorporates Nvidia's Volta architecture and adoption has been broad-based.
Volta offers 500% more deep learning power than its previous edition Pascal.
The stamp of approval is evident with every major cloud player embracing the Volta technology.
At some points during the earnings call, it appeared to be a commercial for data center, gaming and crypto because of the strength of these two segments.
Huang did talk about other businesses such as autonomous driving buttering up its place in Nvidia's lineup.
Autonomous driving will be a $60 billion opportunity by 2035, according to conservative estimates.
Nvidia's DRIVE Constellation continues to be the bread-and-butter platform for automotive companies.
The platform allows car companies to use virtual reality (V.R.) to carry out driving trials.
Two servers have been built to aid in development.
The first server allows simulation in the form of a pseudo video game, and the other server is used to process the simulated data.
In whole, autonomous driving lagged gaming and data center with 4% growth YOY.
This should not alarm investors because Nvidia is in it for the long run.
The software system and infotainment in the first generation of commercial autonomous vehicles will have plenty of Nvidia chips hovering around under the hood.
At some point, every vehicle in the world will require autonomous technology. As Nvidia stays ahead of the innovation curve, buyers will gravitate toward its products.
The architecture of Nvidia chips allows car companies to advance their autonomous vehicle technology.
Nvidia is partnering with other industry leaders such as Tesla and Mercedes Benz, just to name a few.
Going forward developers will harness the power of artificial intelligence (A.I.) to build new software programs for the car.
The new car software will be part and parcel with voice recognition that has quickly come to the forefront of tech development.
Creating a whole autonomous vehicle system to just drag and drop into its business could lead to Nvidia's products becoming the industry standard.
Technical superiority eventually wins out.
Nvidia has diversified into every cutting-edge trend in technology.
Huang understands that to keep buyers salivating over its products, they must be the highest quality.
The reason Alphabet (GOOGL) or Apple partner and synergize with Nvidia so well is because it makes the best of the best and they cannot copy their products.
This is why ZTE, one of the biggest tech companies in China, practically went out of business after Donald Trump cut of its pipeline of critical American components.
Chinese companies have been attempting to buy American chip companies for years because the quality of chips is significantly superior.
Amid a backdrop of a trade war, Nvidia shares have been trading choppily from a strong support level of $200.
It is only a matter of time before Nvidia explodes through the $250 resistance level and climbs higher.
To watch a video demonstration on Nvidia's new RTX ray tracing technology click here.
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Quote of the Day
"The United States must possess unquestioned capacity to launch crippling counter-cyberattacks. This is the warfare of the future ... America's dominance in this arena must be unquestioned and today, it's totally questioned." - said President of the United States Donald J. Trump.
Mad Hedge Technology Letter
May 16, 2018
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(WHAT'S UP AT FACEBOOK?)
(FB), (NFLX), (GOOGL), (AMZN), (GS), (AAPL), (IBM)
Capitol Hill unleashed a healthy dose of criticism on Facebook (FB) CEO Mark Zuckerberg and he has mobilized the forces to avoid a repeat shellacking.
Zuckerberg's response has been to reshuffle his cabinet at the Menlo Park, CA, headquarters, and a few tell-tale signs offer a unique glimpse into Facebook's future.
Basically, something needed to change at Facebook.
The company single-handedly took the blame for the entire sector and was not the only company with a liberal stance on personal data.
Zuckerberg would like to eschew public humiliation and avoid being a sitting duck.
The episode in Washington highlights the need for Facebook to decouple itself from ad revenue, which makes up the lion's share of revenue at the firm and find other levers to pull.
Down the road, Facebook's ad business could get crimped by regulators, and a lack of fallback options haunts Facebook investors in their sleep.
Consequently, a whole slew of high-level management rotation is underway at Facebook.
It is the biggest shake-up in the history of Facebook.
The road map starts with one of Zuckerberg's best friends and protege Chris Cox who will manage the new "family of apps" segment.
This collection of projects he will preside over include WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, and the Facebook Core App.
The step up in responsibility is warranted for Chris Cox who was credited with creating the Facebook news feed after joining the company in 2005 after ditching his Stanford graduate degree program at the time.
The executive reshuffle coincided with WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum, one of Silicon Valley's biggest advocates for data privacy, who quit his post as a show of disapproval to Facebook's business model.
Mark Zuckerberg wants to aggressively monetize the WhatsApp messenger service that was acquired for $19 billion in 2014.
Zuckerberg's blueprint involves using the WhatsApp phone numbers as a vehicle to monetize through offering different products.
Facebook would then collect the data from its 1 billion usership and WhatsApp would become Facebook's new advertisement clearing house.
WhatsApp's leadership vehemently refused this U-turn and Koum decided he would rather leave then see his baby ruined.
Facebook consistently refrained in the past from passing WhatsApp to the data mining scientists and was able to prevent full-scale implementations of advertisements onto its platform.
Currently, there are no ads on WhatsApp's interface, and users could be in store for a massive transformation in look and feel.
Facebook investors have been clamoring for Zuckerberg to start the process of making WhatsApp into a material revenue stream.
Time is of the essence as the big data police creep in from the shadows.
Putting Zuckerberg's top guy on the job embarks Facebook down a new path of hyper accelerated profit-making.
Well, that is the goal.
Compounding Facebook's pivot to other businesses is commissioning a new blockchain tech team.
Blockchain technology, the technology that helped unearth bitcoin, has seen a recent slew of endorsements from financial heavy hitters such as Goldman Sachs (GS), which acknowledged the formation of a new business brokering in bitcoin futures.
A year ago, no reputable organization would touch blockchain with a 10-foot pole.
The utilization of blockchain technology would allow trackability and provide more security.
That would help Facebook to understand the provenance of unique problems allowing staff to nip problems in the bud before they snowball.
Blockchain tech fits nicely within the constraints of the model and would enhance the existing Facebook product.
Let's not forget that Facebook has a mountain of cash to fix any problem that crops up.
It is not one of these early stage seed companies burning through heaps of cash waiting for "scalability" down the road.
Facebook is here and now, and it has the money to show for it.
The pillars of blockchain revolve around cryptography. Blockchain would effectively allow individuals to possess more power over their identity decentralizing the stranglehold from Menlo Park.
Thus, Facebook must invest deeply into blockchain to counter the fear that this technology can marginalize the core business.
This epitomizes the tendency for large-cap tech to become preemptive.
None of the powerful FANGs want to miss the next big shift in technology, and the cash hoard allows them to have skin in the game in each revolutionary trend.
The tide has changed at Facebook from the early years where growing the user base was paramount.
Now that user base has matured into a 2.2 billion marketplace.
Facebook's strategy has shifted to extracting more revenue per user and management closely follows this metric.
Mike Schroepfer, the CTO of Facebook, was tabbed as the man leading the charge for Artificial Intelligence (A.I.), Augmented Reality (A.R.), and Virtual Reality (V.R.) technology.
Facebook was able to poach Jerome Pesenti from IBM (IBM), where he was a critical cog in the development of IBM's Watson, to run the Facebook A.I. team. A.I. is routinely implemented into Facebook's core products to enhance performance.
Promoting Chris Cox as the next in line and giving him control over all the powerful products effectively pushes ad tech down the pecking order.
Javier Olivan is the new man at Facebook tasked for managing ads, analytics, and integrity, growth and product management.
Moving forward, the ad division will be laced with a certain level of security to avoid a repeat of Cambridge Analytica.
Zuckerberg must know that there are other Cambridge Analytica's hidden somewhere in the system; another incident would knock down the stock 5% to 10%.
Facebook could look vastly different in a few years if some of these profit drivers prove successful. It only needs one to work.
Disrupt or be disrupted.
At this point, the big tech companies are considering anywhere or anyone to capture accelerated growth. The FANGs are spilling over to other companies' turf.
Crossover is everywhere and this is just the beginning.
Expect Amazon's (AMZN) ad division to grow from the already $2 billion per quarter, gradually challenging the duopoly of Facebook and Alphabet in the digital ad revenue industry.
It is yet to be seen if the new revamp of management will produce better results.
This move could backfire as the management carousel excluded any fresh blood from taking part.
Effectively, Zuckerberg rotated his best friends into different parts of the business without demoting anyone.
Solidifying his close-knit circle of trust is no doubt a defensive reaction to being hounded the past few months, leaving his existing circle as the few people on which he can still count.
Facebook's stock remains healthy and the brouhaha stoked by the data leak gave investors a timely entry point.
I pounded on the table calling the bluff, begging readers to get into Facebook.
The long-term Facebook story is intact but the stock is overbought short-term.
Investors should not sleep on Facebook as it is a profit machine printing money like Apple (AAPL) and the executive revamp is a bullish development for Facebook.
My bet is that Chris Cox goes for the low hanging fruit monetizing WhatsApp, inciting the next leg up in Facebook shares later in the year.
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Quote of the Day
"Simply put: We don't build services to make money; we make money to build better services." - said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg
