If You Invested $1,000 In Meta Stock At Its Early-November Lows, Here's How Much You Would Have Now

Meta Platforms, Inc. META has turned its fortunes around with its accent on efficiency. Thanks to an improvement in business fundamentals and a positive outlook, Meta is one of the top-performing mega-cap stocks of the year, along with Nvidia Corp. NVDA.

Zuckerberg's Efficiency Mantra Winning: The Federal Reserve rate hikes that began in March 2022 and galloping inflation pushed consumers and corporations to the defensive that year. As companies operated with shoestring budgets amid economic uncertainties, they were forced to cut ad budgets.

This began to pinch ad-dependent platforms, including that of Meta's. The weakness began to show up in the company's results. Meta reported its first-ever revenue drop in the June quarter of 2022. The September quarter wasn't any better. The social media giant's bottom line missed expectations and it issued a weak fourth-quarter forecast.

Meta's cash-draining metaverse bet made matters worse.

It was then the company swung into action. The company announced the first round of job cuts in early November, as it decided to let go of 11,000 employees, representing 13% of its global workforce.

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CEO Mark Zuckerberg called 2023  the "year of efficiency" on the company's fourth-quarter earnings call earlier this year. "We're going to be more proactive about cutting projects that aren't performing or may no longer be as crucial, but my main focus is on increasing the efficiency of how we execute our top priorities," he said then.

Promptly, the company followed up on the job cuts and announced in March plans to eliminate 10,000 more jobs and decided not to hire for additional 5,000 vacant positions.

All these, along with the company's monetization drive helped the sagging stock to rebound.

Q1 Report Round The Corner: Meta is scheduled to report its first-quarter results Wednesday after the market close.

Analysts, on average, expect the company to report earnings per share of $2.03, down from the year ago's $2.72, and revenue of $27.65 million, down less than a percent.

Investors may also be keen to find out about other key operational metrics and Meta's AI initiatives, especially as recent reports suggest Zuckerberg is spending much of his time on the project.

Returns From Meta: Meta shares plunged to a multi-year low (intraday) of $88.09 on Nov. 4, 2022. If an investor had invested $1,000 on Meta's closing price of $90.70 on that day, he would have about 11 shares. The same 11 shares would be worth $2,288 right now.

This suggests roughly 128% gains in 5-1/2 months. In comparison, the broader S&P 500 has gained about 8%, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite about 13%.

In premarket trading, Meta's shares rose 1.94% to $211.57, according to Benzinga Pro data.

See Also: AI to the Rescue: Morgan Stanley Foresees AI-Driven Content Unleashing Monetization Magic for Meta