Facebook - A Few More Months to Go

Resuming now our review of the FANG stocks, here's Facebook (FB).  I see that there are two different timeframe charts of FB which show TopFinders that are late in their lives, the monthly bars chart and the weekly bars chart.  Here's the long term monthly bars chart...

 

This accelerated uptrend started in mid 2013, having spawned a four-fold hierarchy of S curves (green), so it's late in its life.   

A TopFinder (TB-F) fits nicely to both the Aug. 2015 and the Dec. 2016 pullbacks, giving us confidence in its validity.  The fitting parameter D is at 41.8 billion shares of cumulative volume, and as of this writing the cum vol is 39.65 billion, so this trend is about 95% complete.  The dashed vertical line sits at the 41.8 billion share position, where we expect the trend will end.  If average monthly trading volume continues as it has for the last half year or so, then it will take 6 or 7 months to get to the end.  

Now, let's look at the weekly bars chart.  We see that since the end of 2016, price seems to be rising at a significantly greater rate than it was prior to that.  So, let's look at the weekly bars chart covering the past year...

 

Here we see price rising far above the lowest S curve (green), so this is a highly accelerated trend, now spawning a three-fold hierarchy of S curves.  To fit the TB-F to this trend requires D to be 5.6 billion shares of cum vol.  As of this writing, the cum vol is 4.11 billion shares, so this trend is about 73% done, projected to end at the dashed vertical line.  If we assume that average weekly trading volume continues at the rate it's been for the last half year or so, then it will take 4 or 5 months for this to end.  And of course, if trading volume increases it will end sooner, or later if trading slackens. 

So, we have the long term TB-F saying we've got 6 or 7 months to go and the intermediate term one saying 4 or 5 months.  Is this a problematic discrepancy?  Not really.  I've noticed that once a TB-F gets over 95% done, price action tends to become messy, and the end often comes somewhere between 95% and 105%.  At this point, we're getting a more accurate reading from the weekly bars TB-F.  And also, these time estimates vary with the average rate of trading volume.  We'll just have to keep watching these charts as these trends progress to their ends.