Facebook Gives Investors More Reasons To Be Bullish

Summary

Facebook continues to show the world just how replicable Snap's features are.

The company is also making advances in the world of live-streaming content.

Messenger continues to have an exceptional growth outlook with e-commerce integration potential .

Shares of Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) are heading markedly high in trading on Wednesday, 2/22, against a market which is more-or-less flat. The company continues to make advances on all its critical fronts (consolidating the teen social media user base, growing live video engagement, and integrating e-commerce). With multiple growth catalysts still to come, we remain bullish on Facebook's long-term growth trajectory and see further upside for shares.

FB Price data by YCharts

The first bit of news pushing shares higher relates to Facebook's continued attempts to consolidate the teen user base, which Snap (Pending:SNAP) momentarily captured. Facebook gave WhatsApp its own new feature in 'Status', yet another video-centric, Snapchat-mocking feature which underscores just how replicable Snap's current advantages are. The big thing here is that WhatsApp is huge (1.2 billion worldwide users, versus 600 million monthly actives on Instagram) and has tremendous international reach, an area where Snapchat is notably lacking. With Instagram Stories now rolled out globally, Facebook is perfectly positioning itself to stunt Snap's international growth.

The second bit of news pushing FB shares higher relates to potential for the social media platform to live-stream professional sporting events. Facebook is in talks with Major League Baseball to live stream one game per week during the upcoming season. This is notable because it was supposed to be Twitter's (NYSE:TWTR) job to live-stream sports. Whereas Facebook and Snap were intimately involved in the Olympics, Twitter was the platform that was making aggressive moves to live-stream US professional sporting events.