We recently published a list of 10 Stocks Wall Street is Talking About These Days. In this article, we are going to take a look at where Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) stands against other stocks Wall Street is talking about these days.
Gene Muster from Deepwater Asset Management said in a recent interview with CNBC that investors should take a “targeted” approach while investing in major tech companies and look for “pockets” of opportunities.
“I think that when you answer the question more holistically, there’s still—if you look at, uh, we looked at 20 different companies, tech companies, and their reporting season and graded each of them—and of the six Mag Seven, five of the six we gave an A grade, and so there’s still this outperformance that you’re seeing with the fundamentals on these companies, but that doesn’t mean that the best opportunities to invest is necessarily with them, and so again, more of a targeted approach.”
Munster also talked about some major tech companies and said he believes Jensen Huang’s AI chip giant is still “cheap” when it comes to its stock price. However, the analyst advised investors to look for smaller companies:
“You have to be uh strategic in terms of what you’re buying. If you wanted to buy a basket, I would buy a basket of smaller tech companies, sub 500 billion dollars, and focus on those. It’s probably where your bigger outperformance is.”
For this article, we picked 10 stocks currently making moves on Wall Street. With each stock, we have mentioned the number of hedge fund investors. Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter’s strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 373.4% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 218 percentage points (see more details here).
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Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META)
Number of Hedge Fund Investors: 235
Gene Munster, Deepwater Asset Management, said in a latest program on CNBC that Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) CEO Mark Zuckerberg is on “Cloud9” because of the benefits the company is seeing from its AI investments.
“Zuckerberg is on cloud9 and the reason is that he raised guidance by 3%, but these AI tools are having a huge impact in terms of how customers are using them, increasing engagement by 7 to 30%. And so he’s on cloud9. They’re going to be continuing to aggress— invest aggressively in AI. And I think that point about the engagement increasing around AI is really important because as we look around and ask the question, how is AI—what’s the return on investment on AI, Meta is actually showing tangible examples of that increasing revenue. They lower their total expenses for the year by 1%. And so this company’s in a unique area where it’s actually been having this benefit from AI.”
Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ:META) biggest strength remains its huge user base, which continues to grow despite record levels. The company has 3.43 billion monthly active users as of March, up 6% year over year. This equals about half of the world’s total population, giving the company immense power for monetization and data processing. The company also raised its capex guide for the year from $60-$65 billion to $64-$72 billion, crushing concerns about an AI and data center slowdown.
Another overlooked element in Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ:META) business is its ads growth. The company, which depends on advertising for 98% of its revenue, is growing at a rate of 21% YoY. In comparison, Google Search grew by 9%, while Alphabet’s overall business, including Cloud and Services, expanded by 12%. Even YouTube’s year-on-year growth stands at 11%, well below Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ:META) rate.
Given Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ:META) current growth, Wall Street’s estimates of 21% EBIT growth and 18% OCF growth seem conservative compared to the tailwinds the company is benefiting from right now.
Nightview Capital stated the following regarding Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) in its Q4 2024 investor letter:
“Core Opportunity: Meta Platforms, Inc.’s (NASDAQ:META) platforms—Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Messenger—reach nearly half the world’s population daily, making it one of the most powerful advertising ecosystems globally. With investments in AI and augmented reality (AR), we believe Meta is also creating significant optionality for long-term growth.
Competitive Advantage: Thriving Core Platforms: In Q3, we saw Meta achieve a 23% YoY revenue growth,—a testament to strong user engagement across its ecosystem. The advertising landscape as a whole continues to evolve and we believe Meta’s existing platforms offer a defined advantage in this new world. Existing platforms in the age of AI continue to be the most powerful indicator of future success in our opinion.
AI Leadership: Meta’s AI capabilities and the Llama AI model are driving efficiency and product innovation. In our view, these assets have been under-appreciated by the market while enhancing Meta’s ability to further scale and innovate its leading advertising business…” (Click here to read the full text)
Overall, META ranks 2nd on our list of stocks Wall Street is talking about these days. While we acknowledge the potential of META our conviction lies in the belief that under the radar AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns, and doing so within a shorter time frame. There is an AI stock that went up since the beginning of 2025, while popular AI stocks lost around 25%. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than META but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about this cheapest AI stock.
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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.