Well those quarters count obviously (much more relevant than ones from several years ago), and the stock price really only cratered in the last couple of quarters as well.Now do their expenses.Facebook is only a 3x now from its IPO. The value today goes back to October 2015.Facebook down almost 75% from its highs..![]()
And revenue is up 27x over that same time period.
ETA: "Same time period" being since IPO.
I know I'm beating a dead horse in here, but the argument that something is cheap merely because it used to trade higher isn't very compelling at all. For starters, this is a very different company now than it was way back then, but more generally, you could make a very compelling case that many of these names never should have traded where they did. You can make an even more compelling case that the macro environment is substantially worse now than it was then, so even if anything close to those prices may have been justified in the past they no longer are.
Finally, when did 3X over ~10 years (more like ~4X from where it settled after the overpriced IPO) become terrible? It really seems like people don't realize just how unusually great the post financial crisis period had been for equities. Like once in a lifetime kind of great.
This doesn't mean that any particular stock or the market in general isn't going to go back to the moon, but I don't think most people fully appreciate this "golden era" that we just experienced. If you pull up the charts and cover up the parabolic peaks, I think most would be very happy with where we are. I'd certainly sign up right now for a similar return over the next decade, even after this massive re-pricing.
Their expenses really only took off in the last couple of quarters with the metaverse investments. EPS has skyrocketed even faster than revenue up until the last couple quarters. I'm not too worried about that. Either the Metaverse stuff will pay off and then, hey, great. Or it won't and they'll abandon it (like Google does with some huge investment every couple quarters) and go back to printing money the old fashioned way.
As to whether 3x over 10 years is a lot or not. In a vacuum? Sure. For a company that went from a recent IPO that people doubted could properly monetize their product to the 9th most profitable company in the world over that stretch? It's really not that much.
AMZN even after its recent hit over that same stretch has increased revenue by 8x and the stock price is up 1000%. Meta increased rev by 27x and stock price is up 300% after the latest drubbing. EPS of Meta went from negative all the way up to $3.9/share a few quarters ago. Back down now since the metaverse spending but again, from a fledgling IPO with hope to one of the top 10 most profitable companies in the world for that 300% gain.
I still don't think you are seeing my point- the stock was wildly overvalued at the IPO so any comparison to that time period needs to account for that. Some of that overvaluation was warranted based on future prospects, but you can't expect to reap the rewards again when it was built in prior- It needed to have massive growth in order to justify the lofty valuation it began with. That's the challenge with valuations in tech, so much of it is based on what's hopefully coming in the future, and a lot of that growth you're already paying for in advance.
Comparing it to other stocks isn't very compelling either. There's a lot more that goes into it besides revenue growth, but for the comparison to even be fair you have to assume both companies were similarly valued at the time. FB's P/S at IPO was over 15, Amazon's at that same time was under 2, so they weren't starting from anywhere near the same place.
I'm always hesitant to use specific names because people tend to lock onto them, so I want to be clear that I'm not saying Meta is overvalued and/or AMZN is not. Mostly just trying to point out that there are a number of things that factor into stock price, and while it's often hard to make an apples to apples comparison, it's important to at least try to account for those factors.