Media
Can Facebook Live Up to Its Earnings and Growth Expectations?
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It has been no secret that Facebook stock has been on a meteoric rise. For a serious growth story and with its dominant position in social media set, it is not even deemed overly expensive by serious growth stock investor metrics. Still, Facebook’s valuation should start turning heads here on a relative basis.
One of the first things to consider is that this social media giant has recently passed Wal-Mart, JPMorgan, and even GE in terms of market cap. Facebook’s market cap is right around $272 billion, about $2 billion larger than the market cap of GE and about $12 billion higher than JPMorgan. Facebook’s market cap is now about $32 billion larger than Wal-Mart’s.
This incredibly fast-growing company remains the face of social media. Facebook has been grinding higher over the past year after a big run up in 2013 to early 2014, when the stock almost doubled. And the social media behemoth doesn’t look to be slowing down as analysts across Wall Street continue to recommend the stock and have moved price targets higher.
The Merrill Lynch team feels that, overall, investors will continue to migrate to what they call “high-quality” growth stocks, perhaps beginning to eschew momentum darlings that are probably way overpriced. The analysts point to the fact that Facebook has easy second-quarter comparisons to last year for this quarter and through the rest of 2015.
A few analysts chimed in on Facebook ahead of earnings:
Shares of Facebook were down 0.5% at $94.79 on Wednesday morning. The stock has a consensus analyst price target of $100.65 and a 52-week trading range of $70.32 to $99.24.
Despite the strong performance within the past year, Facebook shares are down about 3%, and this dip could be seen as profit taking ahead of perhaps difficult expectations.
So far in 2015, Facebook is the second strongest component of the infamous FANG (Facebook, Apple, Netflix, Google). Year to date Facebook shares are up 22%, only beat out by Netflix which is up 119%.
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