Shares of Meta Platforms (META 0.21%) were among the winners last month. The social media stock took off after the inauguration, benefiting from a potential TikTok ban, the company's increasingly cozy relationship with President Donald Trump, news of increased investment in artificial intelligence (AI), and even the DeepSeek revelation.
Toward the end of the month, the stock also jumped on stellar results in its fourth-quarter earnings report.
According to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence, the stock finished the month up 18%. As you can see from the chart below, the stock took off at the end of the month following the inauguration.
Meta soars again
Meta is coming off an impressive 2024 as its stock surged, its company delivered impressive quarterly results, and it finished the year with the most used AI assistant, Meta AI.
Investors bet that momentum in January would continue as the tech giant seemed well positioned to benefit from a number of trends in the industry.
First, while President Trump temporarily suspended the TikTok ban, the negative attention around the Chinese video-sharing app could benefit Meta, and a sale to an American owner could weaken its algorithm, favoring Meta properties like Facebook and Instagram.
Stocks rose broadly following the inauguration, and investors expect Meta to benefit from a friendlier business environment under the Trump administration, which could also include tax cuts.
In the last week of January, when AI stocks got hammered by the DeepSeek launch, Meta was one of the rare winners in the sector as investors seemed to believe that DeepSeek's open-source model validated Meta's own open-source approach. Additionally, Meta does not have a cloud infrastructure business and is more positioned to benefit from general advances in AI as it grows its social media ecosystem and builds its hardware business. The stock closed up 2% on Jan. 27 even as stocks like Nvidia crashed.
To wrap up the month, Meta delivered a blowout earnings report, beating estimates on the top and bottom lines as earnings per share jumped 50% to $8.02.
Image source: Getty Images.
What's next for Meta
On the earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he expected Meta AI to become the first AI assistant to have more than 1 billion users by the end of the year, and the company also has green shoots in other areas like its Ray-Ban smart glasses, of which it sold over 1 million units in 2024.
Its first-quarter guidance called for revenue growth to slow to between 8% and 15%, but the business seems well positioned for another strong year as it remains at the forefront of AI and its user and advertising base continues to grow. Even after the surge in 2024 and last month, the stock continues to look like a buy.
