A $14 Billion Fund Manager Feels ‘Vindicated’ by Facebook Plunge

Facebook shares fell 19 percent Thursday after second-quarter sales and user growth missed Wall Street estimates. 

(Bloomberg) -- John Streur, an investor who sold his fund’s Facebook Inc. holding after the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal, said he felt "vindicated" watching the social media giant’s free-fall Thursday.

“I’m never rooting for stocks to go down or for companies to go poorly, but pretty simply, we got this,” said Streur, who heads Calvert Research & Management, a socially responsible investing firm with about $14 billion. “We nailed this, and sure, that’s a good feeling."

Facebook shares plunged 19 percent Thursday after second-quarter sales and user growth missed Wall Street estimates. The firm’s biggest one-day drop followed a quarter in which data-privacy issues came under harsh scrutiny, with Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg testifying before Congress on the company’s missteps.

Streur, who said he once enjoyed connecting with "old high school chums" on Facebook, deleted his account last year because he thought the website wasn’t taking its privacy responsibilities seriously enough and he feared the amount of power wielded by Zuckerberg. After doing a “deep dive” into Facebook following the privacy breach, Calvert determined that engaging with the company was unlikely to result in changes and sold all of its shares in April, he said.

Nordea Bank AB’s $370 billion asset-management unit also decided to divest its Facebook holding in June. Of the 1,200 environmental, social and governance funds tracked by Bloomberg, 117 owned Facebook as of Thursday -- a 10 percent drop from March.

©2018 Bloomberg L.P.

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