Yahoo Finance

We're taking a look at meta around the open after the company posted earnings results after the bell Wednesday. The company just narrowly beating revenue expectations in the third quarter and forecasting fourth quarter revenue of 45 to 48 billion dollars. Analysts were looking for 46. Meta also says it expects capital expenditures expenditures to grow significantly in 2025. Here with reaction, Rohit, Carney, Roth, Capital Partners, Managing Director. Rohit, good to see you. We see the stock moved down a little bit here. Of course, close to a record yesterday, and it's up like 60% this year. Um, so do you think that this is quote unquote real disappointment here, or do you think the shares were sort of priced for perfection where they've been?

Hey, thanks for having me and I think it's the latter. It's just that a high-flying stock like meta, you need much more high-flying numbers than what they reported yesterday. I think, I think the key yellow flag in all of this is twofold. One is three queue numbers came in slightly below the elevated expectations that we had heard from investors. And the second yellow flag is they're leaving the investment spend for 25 open for interpretation, as in there's going to be a wide disparity in what investors expect them to say about how much are they going to spend on data centers? How much are they going to spend on operating kind of hiring new people and so on and so forth? They have delayed that. Historically, they used to give this information in October, every year. That's happened over the last many years. Now, they're going to give us that information at end of January. So, there is this period where you have a very important four queue coming up, and then an equally important guidance for spend coming up. So, there is, there's going to be an air pocket in, in Facebook shares. Nothing broken. If you're patient, if you want to look into March, April, May of next year, I think today is the time to buy Facebook shares.

Okay. I was I was going to ask you, you're talking about a lot of yellow flags there, but still maintaining that buy rating. And so, you, you, you kind of brought it back to the positivity towards the end there. So as you're thinking about some of the tools that this company is really going to roll out to try and increase time on the platform, try and increase the ad dollars that make sense for marketers to spend, where is that going to be prioritized and across which of their platforms do you need to see continued success or, even more of a hockey stick type of of delta in the usership on the platform?

I think it is more of the same, in my opinion. It is, it is, for a platform with more than 3 billion daily users. I think slightest improvement in showing the right ad to the right person at the right time, and showing that right piece of content along with it. I think that's an extremely complicated kind of problem to solve. And they're solving that problem in bits and pieces. They've solved it maybe 30, 40% of the way using a lot of AI tools that they have provided to advertisers and improving the targeting of content to consumers. But, I continue to believe that there is going to be a lot of new improvement coming up where that targeting, that engagement, better advertiser ROI, better consumer kind of time spent, all of those things just start to amplify, the classic flywheel that you want in a network like Facebook. And that, that's what we, we feel very bullish on into next year.