I have been long Facebook since the stock crashed last Christmas and like everything else in tech, the stock has had a great 2019.

Yesterday they took $5 billion of their cash hoard to get the Cambridge Analytica scandal behind them. I had no say in this payment, which as a shareholder, seems rather large!

Facebook wants to clear the deck for the next big battle which is money and payments.

They want a piece of this:

I have long thought Facebook should have acquired Shopify but at $35 billion (7 Cambridge Anlaytica scandals), Zuckerberg now has to go it alone.

No matter what walls now get put up by regulators, Facebook is coming for a bigger piece of the e-commerce/payments action.

Disclosure – Long all the stocks in the chart save Visa and Square.