Three Reasons why I'm selling Facebook Shares

Back in September last year I wrote a blogpost called Three Reasons why I'm buying Facebook shares. At the time they had plummeted to a little more than $17 a share but I felt that that the market had overdone the doom, gloom, wailing and general gnashing of teeth – as indeed those Wall Street types are wont to do. 

I was confident that Facebook would be able to achieve that all important monetization (ugly word), especially in the area of mobile, and lo and behold, twelve months later they've done just that. The share price today stands at an impressive $41, but I would suggest that now might just be a good time to sell.

Here are my three reasons why:

1. Brand life cycles can be very short in Interwebland and although I don't think Facebook is going to disappear overnight, anecdotal evidence from friend's teenage kids suggests to me, that for some at least, Facebook is starting to be seriously uncool. A brand like Facebook relies on that all important big fat 'youth pipeline' and as any despairing parent will tell you, you don't want to get on the wrong side of a bunch of fickle teenagers. 

2. The last twelve months has seen the arrival of Over the Top (OTT) services, as the telcos like to refer to them, or probably much nastier things behind closed doors because they are nicking so much of their revenue. The one that seems to be winning through in the States and Europe is, Whatsapp, whilst in Asia, it's Wechat. Their user base is growing mind-bogglingly quickly and they have aspirations to leverage those users in to a more social network space i.e. Facebook space.  Whatsapp is processing 18 billion messages a day, compared with a paltry 10 billion at Facebook. Now that little nugget of information starts to make you think, doesn't it?

3. And my third reason for suggesting selling is that you never go broke taking a profit.