Facebook's still a monster even after seeing more than three times the value of Tesco going up in smoke

There are only four British companies worth more than the $120bn (£90bn) wiped from the Value of Facebook in a heartbeat last night: Shell, BP, HSBC and British American Tobacco.

There were times during after hours trading when you could have taken the latter off that list and added its name to those of Barclays, Tesco, Guinness owner Diageo and Vodafone. They are all giant multinational companies that are worth substantially less than what Facebook investors lost. In fact they lost more than three times the value of Tesco, the supermarket that ate Britain (tm).

A case of the chickens finally coming home to roost as a result of the Cambridge Analytica data harvesting scandal?

Not quite. Facebook has been firefighting on that front for months now, despite little sign of it having any meaningful impact on its numbers or its share price.

In fact, at the close of play on Wednesday the stock was sitting pretty at an all time high. Privacy shmvicay. Who cares?

Then Facebook’s executives were trotted out to deliver the latest set of numbers - for the three months to June 30 - and suddenly the party was over and everyone was dealing with the sort of hangover you get from chasing Diageo’s most famous tipple with spirits on a Friday night before wrapping up with a bottle or three of Sambuca.

Facebook’s first sin was to miss Wall Street’s forecasts for the first time in what seems like forever. Sin number two was the way its executives played the subsequent conference call, and particularly what they had to say about the short term future. Doom! Gloom!

The company’s rate of growth is expected to decline throughout the rest of the year “by high single-digit percentages from prior quarters sequentially in both Q3 and Q4”.

Expressed like that it might not sound like a gut punch to you and me. The company could easily report revenues up 30 per cent or more in final quarter of the year, which is heady stuff.

But when they hear that sort of language on the street of dreams they reach for the antacids and follow up with blood pressure pills.

It isn't the data scandal that's worrying Wall Street because it doesn’t have much reason to be worried about it. The £500,000 record fine Facebook was handed by our Information Commissioner’s Office will barely have registered with its analysts.

Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg also downplayed the impact of the EU’s data protection rules laid down in the oft quoted GDPR.

He said that the vast majority of users - 97 per cent - still allow the company to track them across the web. Feel free to scream WHY at this point because that’s what I did.

It suggests that most people just don’t care that much about the scandal. They are still allowing giant companies to harvest to vast amounts of information on them even when they don’t have to.

Facebook is investing a bunch of money in “security” which will crimp earnings, even though investors with a degree of sanity really ought to welcome such a development.

But their the biggest concern by far is user engagement.

Facebookers might not care about their data, but they’re still not using the social network enough to keep Wall Street happy.

The ads you’ve seen saying 'we’re getting back to connecting people' and 'yah boo sucks to fake news' are as much about drawing us in as they are about reassuring us that 'Facebook is changing" and the nasty things we might have read about are being dealt with.

There are various initiatives going on across Facebook’s various apps, including Messenger, WhatsApp, Instragram, which is still growing nicely, to further tempt us, and the advertisers wanting to reach us. It would probably be good for our health to ignore them. But we probably won't.

It’s worth considering at this point that the company still announced a 42 per cent rise in revenues and a 31 per cent rise in net income (profits in other words).

Facebook is still hurtling down the track like a Japanese bullet train on amphetamines.

There are also still bulls out there who think it can continue. And even if it starts to resemble a Mo Farah rather than a Usain Bolt, so what? It’s really only on Wall Street that you can report that you’ve gobbled up $5bn dollars in three months and get crucified for it.

Facebook is going to throw off more cash than it really knows what to do with for the foreseeable future. There was always gong to come a point when it slowed down a bit. There is such a thing as reaching capacity, even for Facebook.

But it isn’t certain that it’s there yet. Even if it is, it’s still a monster.