News and analysis

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.

Dash (DSH) is up 13.0% this week to $24.30, significantly outperforming the broader crypto market where Bitcoin (BTC) has risen by just 0.6% to $94,839. The rally appears to be driven more by technical momentum than by any fundamental developments, as Dash is likely playing catch-up following Bitcoin’s strong 11.0% surge since April 21. During that same period, Dash gained just 1.6% to $21.46, suggesting delayed investor response.

The key technical level at $20.00 has now been breached, which acted as a resistance cap over the past weeks. With this breakout, Dash has positioned itself for a potential continuation higher, with the next significant resistance target around $30.00—offering roughly 24.0% additional upside from current levels.

The brands like Oreo and Belvita cookies, Alpen Gold, Toblerone, Milka and Cadbury chocolate, as well as Barni bear-shaped snacks for kids’ nutrition never disappoint Mondelez manufacturers. Over 200 more unique trademarks inside the Mondelez portfolio do make it rich. Cocoa bean futures were peaking above $12,500 per ton before Christmas, after ranging between $6,000 and $10,000 in summer and fall of 2024, yet this phenomenon of chocolate inflation still impacted costs during the first two months of the current year. Despite these headwinds, Mondelez weathered the challenges and delivered a better-than-expected quarter.

Even though it released a 18.3% decline YoY on a constant currency basis, with sales for the quarter coming a $30 million below the $9.34 billion estimate, it was up 0.2% from the previous year, and the main thing was that the company posted its adjusted EPS (earnings per share) of $0.74, which exceeded the Wall Street analyst poll consensus of $0.66. The so-called organic or net revenue growth was even above 3%, helped by higher pricing to nearly offset a 3.5% decline in physical volume. Mondelez fully reaffirmed its previous 2025 outlook, projecting nominal sales growth or around 5% YoY, after it already returned $2.1 billion to shareholders through cash dividends and share repurchases during the first quarter. The details emerged last night, prompting a nearly 2% rise in Mondelez's share price in extended trading hours.

Both households and lonely people are gonna save on many things nowadays, but most of us are attempting to eat enough chocolate and biscuits, each time we have a cup of tea or coffee. I know I'm a better person when I'm eating chocolate, or when I'm investing into chocolate names again. And I have reason to believe that I will also have material gains from this action. After all, the nearest technical resistance for Mondelez shares is no closer than $75 per share, while the price has only jumped from $65 to $67, and the average analytical estimate of the pool of experts sets target levels of about $71 per share, which is more than 8% more than yesterday's closing price. Moreover, classic methods of technical analysis show that we are just inside a triangular panel of the flag pattern, which is marked in orange on my drawing, and such patterns are more often broken upwards. The pole of the flag (it is on the left side of the chart) pointed to the top of my target area, which is also shown in orange colour on this chart below. The potential profit here certainly cannot be as high as in the artificial intelligence and cloud segments, but... what do you say to the following simple reasoning?

Manufacturers surely make a lot of money on this common passion, even while they also bear growing operating costs, but why shouldn't we make money on this instead of just spending it? At least to get my money back, so as to get a small income, just enough to buy back my favourite chocolates and cookies once again. If so, my balanced diet is chocolate and chocolate-related equities in both hands today.

Unlike some other businesses selling everyday consumer products, which recently lowered their annual projections for food or hygiene items, including PepsiCo (PEP) and Procter & Gamble (PG), Coca-Cola (KO) now issues a rather optimistic forecast on top of its solid quarterly results. Having profitably raised retail prices on the most substantial part of its product line, the beverage producer relied on resilient demand for its well-known sodas like Fanta and Sprite, juices and ultra-filtered milk offering Fairlife, made with about 50% more protein and 50% less sugar, compared to regular milk products.

In Q1, the giant company earned $0.73 per share, compared with Wall St pool estimates of $0.71 and $0.72 in the same period of 2024. The one-off decline to $0.55 in the Christmas quarter looks to have been overcome. The Coca-Cola's average selling prices are 5% higher while volumes in units increased by 2% QoQ on annual basis. Timely refreshed and higher price tags allowed Coca-Cola to earn more, despite the fact that its quarterly revenue fell marginally from $11.1 billion a year ago and $11.5 billion in Q4 2024 to $11.14 billion, which was in line with analyst expectations.

Of course, The Coca-Cola's operation is partially subject to global trade dynamics which "may impact certain components of the company’s cost structure across its markets," its CEOs admitted in a statement, adding that they expect the impact "to be manageable", as its supply chains are "primarily local". Pushing up costs, therefore, is not critical for its major business now, and it maintained all previously announced numbers for the full-year organic revenue and profit forecasts. Meanwhile, its rival PepsiCo (PEP) last week mentioned "subdued consumer spending", but Coca-Cola managed even to increase sales in highly inflationary markets such as Latin America.

Nothing noteworthy happened to the market price of Coca-Cola immediately after the earnings release, but it rose about 1.5% before the opening bell on April 29, offsetting a roughly equal-size decline on concerns over the previous couple of days. The proximity to its fresh all-time high just below $75 per share (detected on April 22) looks fully justified, while the price has never fallen below $60 this year, compared to its $51.55 low in 2023. The price range between $70 and $75 could be considered as a base case scenario before the next bullish attack, with $77 or even $80 as the next intermediate-term target. This asset is one of the best defensive equities among consumer stocks, perhaps along with Walmart (WMT). But we still feel a bigger potential in the latter one.