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3 weeks ago
UBS Slashes Meta Price Target to $650, Citing 2025 Ad Budget Risk
By: GuruFocus | April 11, 2025
April 11 - UBS reduced its price target on Meta Platforms META to $650 from $786, citing reduced visibility into 2025 digital ad spending amid shifting marketing dynamics, according to a Friday note.
Analyst Stephen Ju maintained a Buy rating but said marketers are reallocating budgets from upper funnel branding to lower funnel performance-based campaigns. He noted this trend mirrors similar movements seen between 2022 and 2023.
Larger platforms like Meta are expected to benefit from a shift in spending away from smaller players, though Ju said a volatile policy environment is limiting advertisers' ability to plan ahead. The resulting uncertainty is clouding forecasts for digital ad budget growth in the year ahead.
The revised target still implies a 19% upside from current levels, but Ju flagged that macro conditions could limit momentum if advertiser confidence remains shaky.
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DiscoverGold
4 weeks ago
Meta plans nearly $1 billion data center project in Wisconsin, Bloomberg News reports
By: Reuters | April 4, 2025
Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META) is planning on spending nearly $1 billion on setting up a data center project in central Wisconsin as part of its investment in artificial intelligence technology, Bloomberg News reported on Friday.
Wisconsin in February reached an agreement with an unnamed company using an alias to develop a data center in the state with an expected multiyear investment of $837 million, according to documents seen by Bloomberg.
The company behind the project is Meta, the report said.
Both Meta and the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp declined to comment on the report when contacted by Reuters.
Investment in data centers has seen an uptick as technology giants have ramped up capex to meet the computing power needed to run generative AI applications such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Gemini.
Meta has earmarked as much as $65 billion this year to expand its AI infrastructure amid investor pressure on big tech firms to show returns on their investments.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s sweeping reciprocal tariffs could hamstring Big Tech’s billion-dollar efforts to build AI infrastructure in the country, likely undermining a key goal of the administration, analysts said on Thursday.
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DiscoverGold
4 weeks ago
META – Major Stock a Bit Quiet in Premarket
By: Christopher Lewis | April 1, 2025
• META Technical Analysis
Meta has the 200-day EMA front and center right now, and as a result, I think you have to be somewhat cautious. If we can turn around and take out the 200-day EMA to the upside, that allows Meta to go back to the $631 level, which is where the 50-day EMA is. If we break down below the bottom of the candlestick for the trading session on Tuesday, then the market more likely than not will dump towards the $520 level, maybe even the $500 level.
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DiscoverGold
4 weeks ago
How Are Options Traders Playing the META Pullback?
By: Schaeffer's Investment Research | March 31, 2025
• META is heading for its worst month since late 2022
• Calls still outflank puts in the options pits in the last few weeks
Meta Platforms Inc. (NASDAQ:META) stock is down 0.9% today, last seen at $571.76. The shares have pared steeper gains from this morning, after Jefferies trimmed its price target to $725 from $810. With a few hours to go, META is on track for its worst monthly performance since October 2022.
Nevertheless, the stock has remained popular among options traders, once more landing on Schaeffer's Senior Quantitative Analyst Rocky White's list of stocks with the highest options volume in the past 10 days, with over 3 million calls and 2 million puts were exchanged. Most of this activity occurred at the March 600 call, which expired two weeks ago.
Despite the bear note today, analysts remain overwhelmingly bullish, mirroring options traders who seem to be buying the dip. Of the 53 brokerages covering META, 47 maintain a "buy" or better rating, while the consensus 12 month price target of $748.99 is a 31.5% premium to its current perch.
On the charts, keep an eye on the equity's 260-day moving average, a trendline that's getting tested today, so far holding up. Longer term, the social media giant is 17.2% higher year-over-year.
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BottomBounce
1 month ago
Facebook, now Meta, has faced numerous lawsuits, including those related to data privacy violations, mental health harms, and antitrust issues, with some resulting in settlements and others still ongoing.
Here's a breakdown of some notable Facebook lawsuits:
1. Data Privacy Violations:
Cambridge Analytica Scandal:
This led to a major privacy crisis where Facebook allowed Cambridge Analytica to access user data without consent, which was then used for political targeting.
$725 Million Settlement:
Meta agreed to a $725 million settlement with users in a class-action lawsuit stemming from the Cambridge Analytica scandal and other privacy issues.
Class Action Lawsuit:
A class action lawsuit, In re: Facebook, Inc. Consumer Privacy User Profile Litigation, Case No. 3:18-md-02843-VC, was filed, alleging that Facebook violated user privacy by sharing data with third parties without consent.
Settlement Claim Website:
A website was established to allow eligible Facebook users to file claims for a share of the $725 million settlement.
Settlement Payout:
The settlement payout was delayed due to objectors' appeals, but the settlement is in place.
2. Mental Health Harms:
Mental Health Lawsuits:
Lawsuits claim that Facebook's platform design and algorithms contribute to mental health problems, such as anxiety, depression, and addiction, particularly among young users.
Addiction and Harmful Effects:
Plaintiffs allege that Facebook's features and algorithms are designed to encourage excessive use and expose users to harmful content, leading to negative mental health outcomes.
Ongoing Litigation:
These mental health lawsuits are part of a larger multidistrict litigation (MDL) against multiple social media companies, with the number of pending actions increasing.
Meta's Response:
Meta has stated that it is working to create a safer environment for teenagers on its apps and has introduced tools to support teenagers and families.
3. Antitrust Issues:
FTC Lawsuit:
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sued Facebook (now Meta) alleging that the company illegally maintained its social networking monopoly through anticompetitive conduct, including acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp.
Acquisitions and Anticompetitive Conduct:
The FTC complaint alleges that Facebook engaged in a systematic strategy to eliminate threats to its monopoly, including acquiring rivals and imposing anticompetitive conditions on software developers.
Ongoing Legal Battle:
The lawsuit is ongoing, with the FTC seeking a permanent injunction and other equitable relief.
4. Other Lawsuits:
Investor Lawsuit:
A shareholder lawsuit related to the Cambridge Analytica data breach and Meta's alleged failure to disclose risks to investors is moving forward.
Trump Lawsuit:
Meta agreed to pay Donald Trump $25 million to settle a lawsuit over his suspension from Facebook and Instagram after the January 6th attack.
Location Tracking Lawsuit:
A class action lawsuit against Meta for tracking users' location without consent was settled for $37.5 million.
B.C. Supreme Court Settlement:
A B.C. Supreme Court judge approved a $51 million settlement for Facebook users in B.C. and three other provinces whose photos were used without permission in "sponsored stories" ads. $META
DiscoverGold
1 month ago
Meta has revenue sharing agreements with Llama AI model hosts, filing reveals
By: Tech Crunch | March 21, 2025
In a blog post last July, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that "selling access" to Meta's openly available Llama AI models "isn't [Meta's] business model." Yet Meta does make at least some money from Llama through revenue-sharing agreements, according to a newly unredacted court filing.
The filing, submitted by attorneys for the plaintiffs in the copyright lawsuit Kadrey v. Meta, in which Meta stands accused of training its Llama models on hundreds of terabytes of pirated ebooks, reveals that Meta "shares a percentage of the revenue" that companies hosting its Llama models generate from users of those models.
The filing doesn't indicate which specific hosts pay Meta. But Meta lists a number of Llama host partners in various blog posts, including AWS, Nvidia, Databricks, Groq, Dell, Azure, Google Cloud, and Snowflake.
Developers aren't required to use a Llama model through a host partner. The models can be downloaded, fine-tuned, and run on a range of different hardware. But many hosts provide additional services and tooling that makes getting Llama models up and running simpler and easier.
Zuckerberg mentioned the possibility of licensing access to Llama models during an earnings call last April, when he also floated monetizing Llama in other ways, like through business messaging services and ads in "AI interactions." But he didn't outline specifics.
"[I]f you're someone like Microsoft or Amazon or Google and you're going to basically be reselling these services, that's something that we think we should get some portion of the revenue for," Zuckerberg said. "So those are the deals that we intend to be making, and we've started doing that a little bit."
More recently, Zuckerberg asserted that most of the value Meta derives from Llama comes in the form of improvements to the models from the AI research community. Meta uses Llama models to power a number of products across its platforms and properties, including Meta's AI assistant, Meta AI.
"I think it's good business for us to do this in an open way," Zuckerberg said during Meta's Q3 2024 earnings call. "[I]t makes our products better rather than if we were just on an island building a model that no one was kind of standardizing around in the industry."
The fact that Meta may generate revenue in a rather direct way from Llama is significant because plaintiffs in Kadrey v. Meta claim that Meta not only used pirated works to develop Llama, but facilitated infringement by "seeding," or uploading, these works. Plaintiffs allege that Meta used surreptitious torrenting methods to obtain ebooks for training, and in the process — due to the way torrenting works — shared the ebooks with other torrenters.
Meta plans to significantly up its capital expenditures this year, largely thanks to its increasing investments in AI. In January, the company said it would spend $60 billion-$80 billion on CapEx in 2025 — roughly double Meta's CapEx in 2024 — primarily on data centers and growing the company’s AI development teams.
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DiscoverGold
1 month ago
Will QQQ Retest All-Time Highs By End of April?
By: David Keller | March 20, 2025
After reaching an all-time around $540 in mid-February, the Nasdaq 100 ETF (QQQ) dropped almost 14% to make a new swing low around $467. With the S&P 500 and Nasdaq bouncing nicely this week, investors are struggling to differentiate between a bearish dead-cat bounce and a bullish full recovery.
There was no question that valuations had become incredibly rich going into the end of 2024, so some sort of corrective move was widely anticipated in Q1 2025. But was the February to March drawdown enough to appease the valuation trolls and empower investors to buy weakness to drive prices to further all-time highs? Today, we'll lay out four potential outcomes for the Nasdaq 100 ETF (QQQ).
As I share each of these four future paths, I'll describe the market conditions that would likely be involved, and I'll also share my estimated probability for each scenario. The goal of this example of "probabilistic analysis" is to expand our thinking of what's possible, to break down our preconceived market biases, and to open our minds to alternative points of view.
Before we do so, though, I'd love to revisit the last time we conducted this exercise on the Nasdaq 100 back in December 2024.
Going into early January, it appeared that Scenario 4, the Super Bearish scenario, was matching very closely with market action. But a very choppy month of January kept prices fairly stable, and by the end of January the Nasdaq 100 was very close to the end of our Scenario 3.
Back to the current market environment, we're thinking a Very Bullish Scenario would mean the QQQ continues the current uptrend, which eventually becomes a full recovery to retest the February 2025 high. On the other hand, if this week is really more of a dead cat bounce, then the Super Bearish Scenario could take us all the way down to retest the August 2024 lows...
* * *
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DiscoverGold
2 months ago
Meta plans to release standalone Meta AI app, CNBC reports
By: Investing.com | February 27, 2025
Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META) plans to debut a standalone Meta AI app to join Facebook and Instagram during the second quarter, CNBC reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter.
The move marks a major step in Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s plans to make Meta the leader in AI by the end of the year, ahead of competitors like OpenAI and Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL), CNBC reported.
Meta did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
Last month, Zuckerberg said that the company plans to spend as much as $65 billion this year to expand its AI infrastructure.
(This story has been refiled to say ’CNBC,’ not ’CNCB,’ in paragraph 2)
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