Facebook Reports Q2 Earnings, Traders Sell News

After the bell Wednesday, social media giant Facebook (FB - Analyst Report) posted Q2 earnings and results were mixed on the top and bottom lines. Earnings of 30 cents per share (accounting for stock-based compensation and other before non-recurring items; the company's headline number was 50 cents per share) on quarterly sales of $4.04 billion compare to Zacks consensus estimates of 31 cents per share and $3.99 billion, respectively. Yet FB shares dropped 5 percent in the after-market following the Q2 announcement. (Since that time, FB shares are down only around 2 percent.)

Aside from Q2 marking the third-straight one-penny miss on the earnings side, everything within the Facebook report looks solid: daily active users (DAU) reached 968 million (963 million was estimated), a 17 percent gain year over year. Monthly active users (MAU) hit 1.49 billion (we expected 1.478 billion), and mobile Facebook users now make up 76 percent of its users, up from 62 percent in the year-ago quarter. 65 percent of Facebook users access the site daily.

And the good news doesn't stop there: capital expenditures, one item analysts tended to cite as a concern going into the Q2 earnings report, was lower than expected at $549 million, down from the $702 million estimated. There simply isn't a lot at first glance of this report that would indicate a selloff in Facebook shares in late trading.

That said, the stock grew 13 percent over the past month, including a nice bump following Google's (GOOGL - Analyst Report) fine earnings report last week. Facebook shares prior to the earnings announcement were up 24 percent year-to-date. It is also the most expensive U.S. Internet stock on a price-to-sales basis. That said, Facebook's roughly 35x forward earnings is far from a nosebleed valuation. But perhaps the $100 per share mark is displaying something of a psychological barrier in the near term.

On the conference call, analysts and investors may have lots of questions regarding growth and monetization of Instagram, What'sApp? and Messenger. There wasn't a lot written on these businesses in the initial report.

Also posting Q2 earnings after the bell Wednesday was Whole Foods (WFM -Analyst Report), and results there were not good. The high-end supermarket missed its earnings estimate of 45 cents per share by 2 cents, and revenues of $3.6 billion were short of expectations by about $70 million. Further, Q3 guidance of 34-35 cents was lower than the Zacks consensus of 39 cents, and comp store sales growth of 1.3 percent was way off from the 2.9 percent analysts had expected. This sent WFM shares plummeting 10 percent in late trading.

Disclosure: None.

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