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Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms
Alex Wong/Getty Images
Wednesday just might be the day that shares of
Meta Platforms
,
the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, bounce off rock bottom.
Shares in the social media giant have had an abysmal time of late. Following weak quarterly earnings and a dismal outlook, Meta (ticker: FB) went into free fall last week, notching the largest one-day loss in market capitalization in U.S. history on Feb. 3, when the stock price collapsed by 26%.
As of Tuesday’s close, the shares have fallen some 42% from their all-time high in September.
Things may be looking up: Meta stock was jumping 2.7% Wednesday, outpacing buoyancy in the wider technology sector. The
Nasdaq Composite,
which tracks some of the biggest U.S. tech stocks, rose 1.5%.
Are investors finally buying the dip? Market participants were already talking about doing just that when Meta began its nosedive last week, and this could represent a first wave of new bets on the stock.
“We have a significant position in Facebook, and we think it’s a great opportunity for long-term investors to buy a great franchise that has sold off on very short-term considerations,” Christopher Rossbach, the chief investment officer at Anglo-Swiss asset manager J. Stern & Co., told Barron’s.
Statistically, the stock looks cheap. Meta is trading at a multiple of 17 times this year’s expected earnings, which is a 40% discount to its peers. And that is a firmly forward-looking measure: The price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio uses a figure for profits based on consensus estimates among analysts…
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