Is the "magnificence" fading? Tesla's shares have plunged nearly 45% from their 52-week high. Apple stock is down nearly 15% from its recent high. Even Nvidia has retreated 10% from its peak.
However, it's not all bad news for the so-called "Magnificent Seven" stocks. Meta Platforms (META +0.40%) just hit an all-time high and could soar a lot more, according to four Wall Street analysts.
Meta has come roaring back
It wasn't all that long ago that many investors had seemingly given up on Meta. In 2022, the company's earnings growth was anemic. Some viewed Facebook as yesterday's news with ByteDance's TikTok on the rise. Skepticism was high, to say the least, about CEO Mark Zuckerberg's big bet on building the metaverse.
After an especially disappointing quarterly update in February 2022, Meta's share price plunged 26% in one day, wiping out $251 billion of the company's market cap. In the stock market's history, no company had lost that much value on a dollar basis in a single trading day. By November 2022, Meta's shares were down 75% below the previous high.
That was then. Meta is now on a roll -- a huge one. Since bottoming out in late 2022, the social media stock has skyrocketed over 450%. Meta's shares are up close to 49% so far this year.
NASDAQ: META
Key Data Points
What happened to turn things around? The same thing that nearly always drives stocks higher: impressive earnings growth and expectations of strong future expansion. It also didn't hurt that generative AI became the King Midas of the modern-day stock market, turning practically everything it touched into investing gold.
Meta has strong upside potential
Can Meta's major momentum continue? At least four analysts think so.
Jefferies recently raised its 12-month price target on the stock to $585 from $550. RBC Capital Markets also upped its price target for Meta to $600 from $565, reflecting a potential upside of 14%. Two other analysts are on the same page as RBC. Wells Fargo and First Shanghai also set price targets of $600 for Meta. Meta currently trades at around $526 a share.
While not quite as bullish about Meta as the other Wall Street pros, Jefferies analysts are decidedly enthusiastic about the stock. They wrote in a note to investors last week that "Meta has too many advantages to count."
Jefferies analysts believe Meta could snag as much as half of total incremental advertising spending in 2024. If they're right, it would be an impressive performance, especially considering the gains Amazon has made in the digital advertising market.
Is Meta stock a buy?
Wall Street pros don't know what the future holds any more than you or I do. It's possible that Meta won't come close to delivering the kind of gains analysts predict over the next 12 months. However, I think Wall Street's optimism about the stock is warranted over the long term.
Facebook remains much more resilient than many might have expected a few years ago. The social media platform had 2.11 billion average daily active users in December 2023, up 6% year over year. Across all of Meta's platforms, the average daily active user count was 3.19 billion, an increase of 8% from the prior-year period.
Meta continues to do a great job at monetizing this massive global audience. Ad impressions have risen. Facebook and Instagram Reels have become a key revenue source. Business messaging on WhatsApp is a big growth driver. The company is leveraging AI to help advertisers automate their ad campaigns.
Zuckerberg thinks it's possible that smart glasses with built-in AI assistants could be a "killer app." He also reiterated that Meta plans to roll out functionality including holograms and a sense of presence for its smart glasses in the future.
Meta intends to incorporate artificial general intelligence (AGI) into its products as well. In the company's Q4 earnings call, Zuckerberg said, "We're going to need our models to be able to reason, plan, code, remember, and many other cognitive capabilities in order to provide the best versions of the services we envision."
I won't be surprised if Meta's shares pull back somewhat over the next year like some of its Magnificent Seven peers have. But I fully expect this stock to be a magnificent winner for investors over the next decade and beyond.
