Meta Platforms (META) is among the top tech gainers in early May, as this social media business has actually added nearly 8.7% to its market value in just two trading days since the latest release of its first quarter earnings. The premise behind such a strong bullish momentum is seemingly investors' cold math that a certain trade and therefore broader economic, tariff-induced instability stage could globally force advertisers to allocate larger parts of their budgets to proven mechanisms for promoting goods and services, including primarily Facebook and Instagram. Other, especially more risky, marketing campaigns can wait until better times, while budgets for Meta would grow. The numbers late on April 30 fully confirmed this bold assumption, and so the current local intraday peak of $604.34 per share doesn't look like a point for even temporarily pausing the bright rally.

Meta's total sales from the beginning of the year to the end of March was $42.31 billion against the average expert estimates preliminary at $41.5 billion only, which gave a 13.8% increase YoY on a quarterly basis against $36.46 billion reported on April 24 2024. Although this is still far from the all-time record of $48.39 billion in the traditionally best Christmas quarter, the quarter-by-quarter dynamics indicates that the high growth pace is continuing. The numbers became the second-highest ever for the company in terms of not only revenue but also profit, where +34.5% YoY gave Meta a whopping $16.44 billion for the quarter. That was equivalent to $6.43 in equity per share, or +22.7% over the $5.26 EPS expected in Wall Street's consensus polls. Meta's revenue for April through June could reach $45.5 billion at the high end of its own estimate, with $42.5 billion at the low end of expectations, which "reflected a decision to more rapidly ready data centre capacity as well as the potential for tariffs to increase hardware export costs", according to Meta CFO Susan Li. The crowd of traders could hardly have wished for anything better.

Family daily active people (DAP), which may be the most resistant metric, grew 6% YoY to 3.43 billion, and added 2.3%, or nearly 80 million users, over the past three months. Meta claims to be making rapid progress in cutting-edge areas such as the Meta AI app assistant and its AI glasses, where the number of users is approaching 1 billion. Meanwhile, current costs do not exceed expectations, as was the case with the first Metaverse projects of creating Meta's own fictional world in 2022, when the ambitiousness of tasks strained some shareholders, so that the company lost its value up to $100 per share. Supposed costs from $113 billion to $118 billion for all of 2025 are even $1 billion below previously estimated range that Meta had been guiding investors toward, despite plans to speed up construction of data centres for its AI features support. What was important, and Meta executives emphasized this point, the total capex was going mainly for supporting the core business, such as supplying the computing power for ads, rather than new generative AI development. But, of course, Meta also needs AI to improve its core ad targeting and recommendations to its social media users.

Now a perfect combination of lowering costs and rising profits clearly helps the stock to shine. The target range for further recovery of the market price between $665 and $700 looks like the most adequate scenario, if we forget for now about repeating Meta's all-time highs above $740, which were detected in mid-February, that is, also quite recently. This seems like a rational trading plan, as Meta still puts user engagement before turning to even more monetization and so higher price goals may be more suitable for long-term investments.