Why Facebook Inc (FB) is Winning the War Against Snap Inc (SNAP)

Although Mark Zuckerberg didn’t succeed in buying Snap Inc (NYSE:SNAP) when it was a start-up, Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) certainly seems to be winning the war against the social app. According to the latest data, more people are using Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB)’s Instagram snapchat-like ‘Stories’ than Snapchat itself. Per the dominant social media company, more than 200 million people use ‘Stories’ daily, up from just 150 million around the beginning of the year. Stories’ 200 million exceeds Snapchat’s around 161 million daily active users and represents how quickly Facebook can adapt to the latest changes given its dominant position in social. Not surprisingly, shares of Facebook have done very well year-to-date, rallying 21% versus the NASDAQ’s around 8% advance.

What Does The Smart Money Sentiment Say?

At Insider Monkey, we’ve developed an investment strategy that has delivered market-beating returns over the past 12 months. Our strategy identifies the 100 best-performing funds of the previous quarter from among the collection of 700+ successful funds that we track in our database, which we accomplish using our returns methodology. We then study the portfolios of those 100 funds using the latest 13F data to uncover the 30 most popular mid-cap stocks (market caps of between $1 billion and $10 billion) among them to hold until the next filing period. This strategy delivered 39.7% gains over the past 12 months and outperformed the 24.1% gain enjoyed by the S&P 500 ETFs. Our enhanced small-cap hedge fund strategy returned more than 45% over the last 12 months and outperformed SPY by more than 30 percentage points over the last 4.5 years (see details here).

The smart money was bullish on Facebook in the fourth quarter. According to our database of 742 top funds, 146 reported owning shares of Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) at the end of December, down 3 funds from the previous quarter. In terms of individual movement, Karthik Sarma‘s Srs Investment Management intiated a new stake of 3.7 million shares in the fourth quarter, good for 12.37% of the fund’s portfolio.

The Bottom Line

Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) is making progress in its war against Snap. For more reading, check out ‘16 Biggest Facebook Groups in 2017‘.

Disclosure:None

Frederic Legrand – COMEO / Shutterstock.com