With worries about the SARS-CoV-2 virus at fever pitch, investors are running for the hills, sending stocks plummeting. Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) is no exception. Shares are down 9.5% since the company issued an earnings warning last week because of COVID-19, which is approaching a pandemic level.

But that decline in shares of the iPhone maker could present an opportunity for investors to build a position in Apple. Yes, the problem is worsening, and Apple already warned investors about lower results for the current fiscal second quarter — but there are reasons to be optimistic about Apple’s prospects over the long haul.

Demand isn’t going away, it’s just delayed

When Apple issued its fiscal second-quarter earnings warning, it expected a slower ramp-up in production after the Chinese New Year because of coronavirus. With factories shuttered and employees sick, the company’s ability to churn out products is limited. Many of Apple’s and its partners’ stores are closed, also weighing on shares.

With the outbreak raging on, and concerns growing that COVID-19 may have begun spreading in the U.S., it’s understandable that investors are nervous. The epidemic is the reason the markets have been tumbling this week, and shares of Apple have been under pressure. If it lasts longer than expected and becomes more widespread, it could result in Apple reporting a really ugly second quarter in which it loses billions of dollars in sales.

But there’s a silver lining, so investors shouldn’t panic. The issues are supply-related rather than demand-driven. When Apple issued an earnings warning at the start of 2019, it was because of a lack of demand, particularly in China; iPhone sales were suffering because not enough consumers wanted to pay up for the latest mobile device from Apple. This time around, business was booming in China, and would have continued to do so if not for the novel coronavirus.

Outside of China, Apple said demand across all its products and service categories has been strong and in line with expectations. If demand outside of China can offset the weakness more than Wall Street is forecasting for the second quarter, Apple shares could get a lift.

The more likely scenario is that sales Apple would have recorded during the current quarter will appear in the quarter ending in June. That’s typically a seasonally slow period for Apple, and it could use that time to catch up on demand and get the supply chain back in order.

It could drive iPhone 12 sales

There’s no question Apple is losing sales of the iPhone 11 because of COVID-19, but that may create a situation where more consumers purchase its upcoming iPhone 12 5G model. The company is expected to launch its first 5G phone in the fall, ushering in what many on Wall Street are calling a “supercycle” for Apple. That supercycle could get a bigger boost if more consumers who were prevented from purchasing an iPhone 11 by the epidemic instead purchase an iPhone 12. If that proves true, the coronavirus would become a timing issue for Apple, and the stock is likely to be rewarded.

It’s one of the reasons Morgan Stanley said this week that it’s buying Apple’s shares on the weakness. The Wall Street firm maintained its $368 price target, implying more than 30% upside. In addition to the 5G iPhone, Morgan Stanley pointed to Apple’s services and wearable units as driving growth.

Even Warren Buffett, whose Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRK.A) (NYSE: BRK.B) is Apple’s largest shareholder with 245 million shares (a 5.7% stake), doesn’t see the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak as a reason to unload shares of good companies. He told CNBC that investors shouldn’t react in the short term, but that if there’s an opportunity to buy good stocks at depressed levels, then they’re in luck. As for Apple, Buffett said it’s “probably the best business I know in the world.” That’s quite an endorsement — and another reason why investors can benefit from Apple’s current weakness.

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Facebook (NASDAQ: FB) is betting a new virtual reality (VR) world it’s creating will ignite the market, with VR glasses someday replacing smartphones. But while the social-media giant is big on vision, its past forays into VR headsets have been light on successes.

Earlier this month, Facebook’s VR unit Oculus unveiled Horizon, a new social VR world that will be available next year to customers of its Oculus Quest and Rift VR headsets. Drawing on everything it’s learned since acquiring Oculus in March 2014 for $2 billion, the company created a virtual space where people can explore new places, play games, create communities, and interact with other users. Oculus users create an avatar and then access games and experiences that Facebook is creating for this new virtual world. Oculus customers are also able to create their own worlds without needing any coding experience.

Facebook wants to give consumers a reason to buy VR glasses

The idea, for now, is to give consumers a reason to spend several hundred dollars on virtual reality headsets.

Without a killer app, the VR glasses market has failed to take off in a big way. Facebook and other technology companies are betting augmented reality (AR), where real-world places are melded with digital images and videos, will be the driver of future growth.

As it stands, the combined AR and VR market is small but is projected to skyrocket in the coming years. According to Allied Market Research, the global augmented and virtual reality market stood at $11.35 billion in 2017. It’s projected to reach $571.42 billion by 2025, for a compound annual growth rate of 63.3%. The gaming industry, particularly mobile gaming, will be a big driver of growth.

Facebook’s vision goes beyond a virtual world

Facebook has a much bigger vision for Horizon than creating a virtual world just to interact and to play games in. The idea is to eventually create “LiveMaps” that sit on top of existing maps, giving users contextual data about a physical location in real time.

A user could stumble upon a restaurant and be able to see the full menu, make a reservation, or place an order directly from the glasses. Showtimes could pop up as a person passes a movie theater, or more information about an object could appear when touring a museum. Forget videoconferencing: In Facebook’s AR/VR world, users will communicate with a hologram of the person on the other end of the phone.

Horizon and LiveMaps are the latest in Facebook’s efforts to spur the VR market, but there could be more. A report recently surfaced that Facebook was teaming up with Luxottica Group, parent of Ray-Ban, to develop augmented reality glasses, code-named Orion, which will be ready between 2023 and 2025. Users will be able to make calls, access information about a location, and live-stream from the glasses, which Facebook and Ray-Ban hope will someday replace smartphones.

Can Facebook deliver?

Facebook has big ambitions in the AR and VR markets, but if history is any guide, there may be tough going ahead. When Facebook acquired Oculus, it thought it was on the cusp of owning the next big thing in technology. Oculus still makes high-tech VR glasses, but they haven’t yet justified the cost. For Facebook to hit it out of the park this time, it has to create something that’s so compelling people won’t think twice about spending money on an entertainment device.

It also has to convince consumers they can trust Facebook. The social-media giant’s reputation was tarnished by the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which broke in March 2018; that case revealed that the now-defunct political consulting firm accessed the data of 87 million Facebook users without their permission. Since then Facebook has had other data breaches and scandals, and it recently agreed to pay a record fine of $5 billion to the Federal Trade Commission.

If Horizon is to take off, as it sets out to map the world, consumers can’t fear that advertisers, special-interest groups, or nefarious players can access their data or their locations. That may be quite a challenge for Facebook, as it faces calls from all over the world to do more to protect the privacy of more than 2.4 billion active monthly users.

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The holiday season will soon be upon us, which means people will soon start shopping in earnest. Many will turn to the internet to find the perfect gift, despite the efforts of retailers to lure them into stores.

Online sales still make up a small portion of overall retail spending, but they’re growing. E-commerce and non-store sales are forecast to increase by 11% to 14% in 2019, reaching between $162.6 billion and $166.9 billion, respectively. The National Retail Federation predicts total retail sales for the holidays will increase as much as 4.2% year over year to $730.7 billion.

The holiday season isn’t the only thing going for the e-commerce market. As more consumers shift their shopping to the internet, traditional retailers are forced to shutter stores. That presents an opportunity for e-commerce players to steal some of that lost business. Goldman Sachs pegs the value of that opportunity shift at $7.5 billion.

If that’s not enough good news, online shopping is also growing outside of the U.S. in places that have growing middle-class populations like China, Latin America, and India.

With so much to like, it’s no wonder many e-commerce companies have stocks that are up double-digit percentages year-to-date. But like with any industry, there are the haves and the have-nots. The haves is where investors should focus their investment dollars. Here’s a look at three of them.

1. Shopify powers e-commerce behind the scenes

No matter what a merchant plans to sell these days, it is going to need a platform to sell it online. For years that has been dominated by the likes of e-commerce giants like Amazon and eBay. But a third player — Shopify (NYSE: SHOP) — has emerged recently and is growing at a fast clip.

The Canadian e-commerce platform specialist enables individuals and companies to build their own online stores. Shopify gives merchants access to a slew of features and apps to help small businesses sell their products directly and/or list them on marketplaces and social media sites across the internet.

That business model has served Shopify well since its launch in 2004 and IPO in 2015. Take its second-quarter 2019 report as evidence: It posted a 48% year-over-year increase in revenue to $362 million.

Shopify is in expansion mode and recently announced a $450 million deal to acquire 6 River Systems, a warehouse fulfillment company specializing in warehouse robotics and cloud software. The acquisition is aimed at supporting its new business, Shopify Fulfillment Network, which it introduced in June. That platform is designed to give new and existing merchants access to lower shipping costs and enhanced delivery services.

While the stock is up 127% so far in 2019, some analysts expect it to surge even higher as we head into the holiday selling season and more merchants join the fast-growing e-commerce platform. In fact, one Wall Street watcher predicts Shopify will end 2019 with more than 1 million merchant customers. Not bad for a company that’s been around for four years.

2. Stitch Fix brings personal stylists to the living room

Not everyone in America considers themselves a fashionista, and that is where Stitch Fix (NASDAQ: SFIX) comes in. The styling service company splashed on to the scene in 2011, offering consumers access to their own personal stylists without having to get off the couch. For a monthly fee, clients get curated pieces of clothing and accessories shipped to their door. They pay for what they keep and return the rest to the San Francisco-based company. That type of service has resonated with consumers.

Stitch Fix ended the fiscal fourth quarter earlier this month with 3.2 million customers, up 18% compared to a year ago and in line with Wall Street expectations. It had forecast revenue growth of 20% to 21% for Q1 of 2020, which fell below analysts consensus estimates of about 23% growth. The e-commerce company blamed more sales of lower-priced items and less marketing dollars spent in the fiscal fourth quarter for the lowered guidance.

Despite the results, there are reasons to like Stitch Fix as a play on the e-commerce market. It has expanded into new clothing categories — men and children — and recently launched a new service in which customers can purchase items on the website in addition to getting their scheduled box of clothing. It’s also enhancing its algorithms and giving customers new ways to shop, which bodes well for sales, especially as we approach the holidays.

3. Alibaba’s trade war risk is already baked in

Investing in Chinese companies these days is fraught with risk. The U.S. and China are in a protracted trade war, with President Trump ramping up the tough talk lately. Nobody knows for sure what the president has in store for Chinese companies listed on the U.S. stock market, which has worried investors and weighed on share prices. Still, that doesn’t mean there aren’t some Chinese stocks worth looking at. One of those is Alibaba (NYSE: BABA), China’s largest e-commerce company.

Alibaba caters to billions of customers in China and around the world. Its business has been booming. In its latest quarterly earnings report (released in mid-August), Alibaba posted revenue growth of 42%, handily beating Wall Street expectations. It ended the quarter with an adjusted EBITDA of about $5.7 billion, up 34% year over year.

Despite all that good news, the stock has been battered in the past several weeks (down about 10%), which could provide a buying opportunity. After all, despite tariffs, a trade war, and posturing from the White House over the past year, Alibaba stock is still up 19.8% year-to-date.

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The race to $1 trillion in market capitalization has been well documented, as some of the nation’s biggest technology companies have flirted with that milestone in the past 18 months.

Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) was the first to achieve it in early August 2018, flirted with the artificial milestone through November 2018, but then fell in value before hitting the mark again in the middle of last week. Apple is hoping this one lasts a little longer. Shares for the tech giant quickly came under pressure in the days that followed, as investors and analysts digested all the information from Apple’s product launch on Sept. 10, and the price dipped. But the stock is back up again and the market cap is now hovering right around $1 trillion.

So what’s behind the rise and fall and rise again of Apple’s market cap in such a short time frame?

First, the good news

For years now Apple has chosen early September as the time to roll out new products and services. After all, the holidays are mere months away, and who doesn’t want a new iPhone or iPad as a gift?

But Apple also used this year’s event in the Steve Jobs Theater at the company’s Cupertino, California, headquarters to tout its upcoming streaming-content service Apple TV+, and its gaming service Apple Arcade. To stand out from the growing number of competitors, it announced a $4.99 monthly subscription fee for both services. It also said that if you buy a new Apple device you get a one-year subscription to Apple TV+ for free. That was well received by the legions of fans who attended the event in person or watched a live stream of the event.

Add the iPhone 11, the iPhone 11 Pro, and the iPhone 11 Pro Max to the mix, and you can’t blame investors for getting giddy. With iPhone sales becoming sluggish here and in China, giving consumers reasons to upgrade is important to Apple’s finances. It didn’t hurt that the basic version of the iPhone 11 is priced at $699, lower than previous iPhone launches. One of the knocks on Apple is that its iPhones are simply too pricey; consumers are less inclined to throw down $1,000 or more for a mobile device unless it gives them a completely new experience.

Apple also unveiled a new iPad, an upgraded iPadOS (operating system), and the next version of the Apple Watch. All these devices have advanced technology, longer battery lives, and eye-catching colors and designs. Enthusiasm around its new devices and services sent shares of Apple climbing, and it’s market cap followed suit, rising above the $1 trillion mark.

Then some bad news dissipates enthusiasm

But then on Friday, Sept. 13, Goldman Sachs’ analysts weighed in, and some of that euphoria dissipated. In a research note reported on by MarketWatch, analyst Rod Hall cut his price target on Apple to $165 from $187 and maintained his neutral rating. The reason for his move: Apple TV+.

The way the analyst sees it, Apple is making a big mistake by pricing its content service at $4.99 a month; he argues that it will hurt earnings. He said the one-year free trial will lower the average selling prices (ASPs) for Apple’s devices, and thus its margins, even if it achieves higher services revenue.

“Effectively, Apple’s method of accounting moves revenue from hardware to services even though customers do not perceive themselves to be paying for TV+,” Hall wrote in the research note to clients. “Though this might appear convenient for Apple’s services revenue line, it is equally inconvenient for both apparent hardware ASPs and margins in high sales quarter[s],” like the upcoming holiday quarter (the first quarter of fiscal 2020). The analyst warned fiscal Q1 earnings results could be “materially” lower than forecast.

Apple quickly pushed back on that assessment, saying in a statement to CNBC that the pricing of Apple TV+, including the one-year free trial, won’t have a material impact on its financial results.

What it all means

Apple’s response appears to have been enough to calm some nervous investors. As of Wednesday morning, Apple’s market cap stands right around $1 billion with shares trading at $221.64. It’s still the second-highest-valued tech company behind Microsoft, with a market cap of $1.05 trillion; Amazon is a distant third, with a market value of $900 billion.

While reaching $1 trillion in market capitalization makes for good headlines and dinner party conversations, in the grand scheme of things it’s nothing more than an artificial milestone. Consider the case of U.S. Steel, for example. Around the turn of the 20th century, it was the first company to achieve a market capitalization of more than $1 billion. But in the decades following that milestone, a slew of companies achieved much higher market capitalizations and have far surpassed it. Apple will forever be known as the first company to reach $1 trillion in market cap, but if consumers aren’t buying its future products and consuming its services, it won’t matter too much if once upon a time it was valued so richly.

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The company behind the disappearing-message app has seen its shares rise nearly 200% year-to-date, eclipsing the entire technology sector. It’s a far cry from two years ago, when it debuted on the stock market only to plunge as concerns about its ability to grow mounted. At the start of this year, Snap had already lost $20 billion in market value.

It has since recouped some of those losses. When Snap had its IPO in March 2017, it was worth $31 billion; its market cap now stands at $22 billion. It’s also making investors more money than its rivals are. Facebook (NASDAQ: FB) and Pinterest (NYSE: PINS) are enjoying double-digit growth in their share prices, but it’s not nearly the upswing in Snap’s stock. Year to date, Facebook is up 42% while Pinterest is 16% higher.

So what’s behind this newfound love for Snap?

Strong earnings and new revenue opportunities are what appear to be driving shares.

For its second quarter, which it reported on in July, Snap had a narrower loss than Wall Street anticipated. Revenue of $388 million also topped forecasts. More importantly, Snap reported higher-than-expected daily active users (DAUs), a key metric for assessing its growth. For the quarter, it had 203 million DAUs, higher than the 192 million Wall Street was looking for.

In prepared remarks, CEO Evan Spiegel said the growth in its community, engagement, and revenue is due to transitions the company has undergone in the past year and a half. It was the second quarter in a row that its user base increased. For the third quarter, it’s forecasting DAUs of 205 million to 207 million.

Snap goes back to its roots

When Snap went public two years ago, it had high hopes of becoming the next Facebook. It envisioned a world in which Snap was used by everyone. But the app and its image filters and lenses have really only resonated with younger users.

Adults, including advertisers, found it difficult to use. After failed attempts in 2018 to appeal to the masses and a redesign that led to a decline in users, Snap went back to its roots. It’s now focused on those younger users, who are more engaged thanks to advanced technology such as augmented reality.

During the year, it rolled out a lens that enabled users to see what they would look like as the opposite sex and another one that enabled them to see how they would look as babies. They were hugely popular, drawing millions of people to its overhauled Android app and boosting engagement. Investors can expect more of that in the future.

Gaming brightens the outlook

But it’s not just its core user growth that has investors giddy. The company is also going after new revenue opportunities. This spring it rolled out Snap Games. While Snap has yet to provide granular details about how the new platform is doing, Spiegel has said it’s doing well. It’s designed for users to participate in gaming with their friends.

The platform has at least one Wall Street firm excited. Evercore ISI analyst Kevin Rippey recently raised his investment rating on the stock and upped his price target to $20 a share because of its gaming business. The analyst thinks it will be the new growth driver for Snap, generating as much as $350 million in revenue each year by 2022.

“In our view, the near-term picture for Snap’s fundamentals remains extremely positive with respect to user trends, revenue, and improved profitability,” Rippey wrote in a recent research report. “Adding to this, and informing our upgrade, is the view that over the medium and longer-term, gaming provides Snap a credible vector of incremental growth, naturally fitting with the platform’s differentiated appeal to younger cohorts looking for innovative digital experiences to extend real-world relationships.”

Whether or not Snap can ever achieve $350 million in annual revenue with its gaming platform is anyone’s guess. But with its user base and engagement growing, advertisers are clamoring to stand out on the platform, which bodes well for a social media company that was written off shortly after it debuted as a public company.

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Take ridesharing start-up Lyft. The stock is 43% lower since its IPO in late March. Slack isn’t doing much better — shares are down 36% since it went public near the end of June. Uber’s off 22% since May. All in all, it’s a dismal showing for a group of Internet start-ups that have transformed the way we work and get around.

There are many reasons for investors to be disillusioned with these three. The companies may have amassed millions of customers and raised hundreds of millions of dollars, but profitability eludes them — as does a path to achieving it.

It doesn’t help that sentiment is changing. Investors are growing weary of the narrative that profit doesn’t matter. The idea of growing at all costs may have served them well as private enterprises. But with investors to answer to, profitability matters as much as growth. That is something all three haven’t been able to deliver on yet, which is reflected in their performance as publicly-traded companies.

Profit eludes all three

Take Slack, the seemingly fast-growing maker of a mobile communication app. It was able to beat Wall Street expectations for its first quarter as a public company, but its guidance for a wider-than-expected third-quarter loss and a decline in revenue for the full year has spooked investors. It was only a year ago that Slack had revenue growth of 100%. That’s now forecast to be around 50% for fiscal year 2020. Investors are concerned that Slack is more of a flash in the pan that won’t be able to keep competition from Microsoft at bay.

Then there’s Uber. For its second quarter, it posted a wider per-share loss and lower revenue than expected. It had a record net loss of $5.2 billion, with most of it due to its stock-based compensation costs. Excluding that expense, Uber reported a loss of $1.3 billion, which is about 30% more than in the first quarter. Revenue was up only 14% versus last year’s second quarter, raising concerns about its ability to grow. The ride-hailing company recently laid off 400 people in its marketing department in an effort to reduce costs and increase efficiency.

Its rival Lyft had its own losses to deal with: $644.2 million, or $2.23 a share, in its second quarter, which was much wider than the $1.58 a share that analysts were expecting. It did report revenue that was up 72% year over year.

Growth is always on their minds

During conference calls and media appearances following their quarterly earnings reports, executives of the three companies talked about profitability as a future goal but not something they were worried about now. In their minds, growth in fiercely competitive environments is still the No. 1 objective.

“We can push the company to break even if we really wanted to, frankly,” said Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi in an interview with CNBC. Meanwhile, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield told CNBC that the company is investing its $800 million in cash on growth. The idea is to create new features and draw more business to its platform. Lyft CEO Brian Roberts has been quoted as saying he thinks losses peaked last year, but has been vague when it comes to its break-even date.

Brushing off the need for profitability may have been OK a couple of years ago, but not in the current environment. Had these companies tapped the public markets before scandals, missteps, and executive departures plagued them (at least in the case of Uber and Lyft), the stocks may have performed better.

But with the economy showing signs of a slowdown and with these companies losing huge amounts of money, investor sentiment is shifting. It’s the reason Uber, which was billed as the next Alibaba, didn’t deliver in its IPO. (Alibaba holds the title for the biggest tech IPO ever, raising $25 billion.) It’s why Lyft is facing lawsuits since its IPO and why investors are questioning Slack’s staying power. Profit — or a path toward it — matters more than growing at all costs.

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With the U.S. presidential election coming in 2020 and with Facebook’s (NASDAQ: FB) reputation still tarnished after 2016 when misinformation and fake political ads dominated the newsfeed, it announced new steps to crack down on anyone trying to use the platform for political maleficence.

Whether these moves will be enough to quiet the public outcry from regulators, lawmakers, and privacy advocates who want it to overhaul how it handles customers’ data is up for debate. After all, Facebook can’t seem to protect its own customers’ data, let alone election advertisements. Just this week, it confirmed personal data (including phone numbers) from more than 400 million users was sitting on an unprotected server accessible to anyone online. It also recently agreed to pay the Federal Trade Commission $5 billion, the largest fine levied against a tech company, because of its lackluster privacy practices.

Checking IDs

In a blog post last week, Facebook announced that organizations trying to buy advertisements related to politics or social issues on Facebook and Instagram will have to go farther than before to prove their identity.

Under the old guidelines, those seeking to buy political ads have to prove who they are and where they’re based in the U.S. Under the new guidelines beginning in October, organizations will also be required to provide a tax ID number, a government website domain that matches an email ending in .gov or .mil, or a Federal Election Commission identification number. Advertisers who don’t have those credentials are required to provide a verifiable phone number, business email address, mail deliverable address, and business website that has a domain that matches the email. Facebook is giving advertisers a few weeks to comply.

Facebook wrote in the blog post:

Starting mid-September, advertisers will need to provide more information about their organization before we review and approve their disclaimer. If they do not provide this information by mid-October, we will pause their ads. While the authorization process won’t be perfect, it will help us confirm the legitimacy of an organization and provide people with more details about who’s behind the ads they are seeing.

Facebook’s efforts are designed to appease regulators, lawmakers, and privacy advocates, who are paying close attention to how the social media network operator will police its news feed ahead of the election. They don’t want a repeat of 2016 when Russia was suspected of spreading misinformation and sowing political discord with fake ads and social media accounts.

Facebook has been pouring tons of money and lots of manpower into the effort, with varying results. On the downside, in October 2018, media outlet Vice News was able to buy political ads that stated they were paid for by Vice President Mike Pence and ISIS. In more positive moves, in May, Facebook added a “Paid For” disclosure to all ads related to politics. The company also recently banned The Epoch Times, a conservative news outlet that reportedly spent around $2 million on ads that promoted President Donald Trump and spread lies about his political rivals.

Political ads mean big money

Some lawmakers — and 2020 Democratic presidential candidates, including Elizabeth Warren — are calling for stricter oversight of the social media giant. If it runs into trouble with the 2020 election, those calls could get louder. Given all the potential risk, you’d think Facebook would simply ban political ads altogether. But there’s a big reason it won’t: revenue.

According to GroupM, the media investment unit of ad company WPP, advertising in the U.S. including political ads is expected to see an 8.2% increase in 2020, with digital ads driving the growth. In 2018 (a mid-term election year), GroupM said political ads accounted for $9 billion in spending, and that number should increase during the 2020 election (ad spending during elections is on a steady rise). Facebook isn’t the only social media platform that will benefit from political ads, of course, but it will get a hefty share of the revenue. While no specific numbers are available, Ad Age projects that Facebook will control about 10% of the $151 billion overall digital ad market in 2020. If political ads in 2020 are higher than the 2018 figure of $9 billion, an educated guess would extrapolate that Facebook’s 10% share in 2020 will easily exceed $1 billion overall.

Keeping political ads front and center is also necessary for Facebook as it works to lessen its dependence on News Feed ads and diversify its revenue streams to better incorporate newer products such as Stories. When reporting earnings in July, Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said Stories will be a big opportunity for the company and its advertisers over time.

While Facebook’s stock has declined 8% since reporting earnings on July 24, there’s still more risk for investors. If the 2020 election comes and goes without a hitch, Facebook shareholders should be able to breathe a sigh of relief. But if misinformation, fake ads, and smear campaigns become the norm again, investors might want to brace for a rocky ride with the stock.

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