META has hovered around its YTD lows at $540 per share through the tail end of August, as the lawsuit concluded. On August 26, the market responded positively to the settlement and the news that the company only needs to shell out $18B spread over 10 years. Our tracked YouTubers have unanimously rated META a buy throughout the previous month, citing that the market is pushing too bearish and that the lawsuit will likely be a big nothingburger.

Joseph Carlson

Joseph Carlson, who publishes his portfolio and the running profit or loss on each position, said Meta stayed his top pick for the year even after it became the worst-performing thing he owned. He was down almost $38,000 on it and put the obvious objection to himself before answering it. "So this has been a terrible holding, a terrible position, a total devastating loss, right? I don't think so," he said. A losing position only means he was wrong, Carlson said, if the company underneath it is deteriorating. "The problem comes in when there's fundamental deterioration with the company, and I don't see that with Meta." What he was looking for instead was the gap between how the stock was trading and how the business was performing. "The reason that I have Meta as a number one stock pick is because I have a sense for when sentiment is incredibly low on a company, when the stock price is depressed, and the fundamentals are good," he said. "In Meta, all of these things arrive." Carlson made the same case in terms of what he stood to lose by being early: "Meta offers a rare case of a company that has huge ambitions, huge potential upside, but a lot of the downside is already priced into the stock and largely limited."

Daniel Pronk

"The $1.4 trillion number is being used for theater and shock value," Daniel Pronk said of the penalty four states were seeking. "No courtroom in the United States is going to bankrupt Meta, and even lawyers on both sides are not taking this number seriously." Pronk, a fundamentals guy, measured the threat against the balance sheet: Meta holds "over $90 billion of cash" and generates "over $130 billion in operating cash flow per year," enough to cover a settlement in the tens of billions without the business feeling it. His model put fair value at "827 bucks, and a future share price of roughly $1,100" over the following three years. "I do continue to be extremely bullish on Meta over the longer term," he said, "and I think that relative to the long term, the share price today is looking very attractive."

Couch Investor

Neil Rozenbaum of Couch Investor, a Motley Fool contributor who publishes every trade with the price and size attached, said the $1.4 trillion in penalties four states were seeking was never a real number, since it came to roughly the entire value of the company. "It's not going to happen," he said. "Meta itself is worth $1.4 trillion. I don't see this happening." Rozenbaum put the actual bill at "15 to $200 billion," a sum that would hurt without threatening the business, and said the stock would climb once the market worked that out. "We can go up by over 50% over the next 12 months just because of a sentiment shift," he said. Rozenbaum bought as the price fell, adding at $591 and again below $600, where he called the stock "disrespected" and "extremely, extremely attractive at these prices." He attached one condition to how long he would keep buying: "I will keep adding more shares under $600."

The Patient Investor

Meta's latest quarterly filing lists $349 billion in non-cancelable contractual commitments and roughly $347 billion more in leases that haven't started, close to $700 billion in obligations that never appear as debt on the balance sheet. The Patient Investor said the people calling that hidden debt are reading one side of the ledger. "You're not seeing the liabilities, but you're also not seeing the revenues," he said, since Meta would not sign $700 billion in commitments without expecting to earn back several times that. He made the same point about the spending itself: "This is not metaverse 2.0. The company is not making monkey JPEGs." On the trial, he put the realistic figure near $200 billion against the $1.4 trillion headline, and said that uncertainty is why he holds less Meta than Amazon. At "17 times earnings," which he called "dirt cheap" against an average of 22, his model returned "about $1,100 per share, which is about 102% on the upside or a 15% annual return." "I think Meta here is undervalued. I think it's priced really well for the underlying risks," he said. "I own it in my portfolio. I'll be buying more."

Parkev Tatevosian

Meta’s expenses grew 55% last quarter against 28% revenue growth, and the stock fell nearly 10% the day after it reported. Parkev Tatevosian kept his buy rating anyway. He was blunt about the quarter, calling the gap “a nearly 2:1 ratio of expense growth to revenue growth,” noting free cash flow had fallen to $784 million, and cutting his own full-year forecast to $1.27 billion from $42 billion the year before. What outweighed it was something he heard on the earnings call: management declined to forecast 2027 capital spending and said near-term capacity was worth more to them than long-term. He hadn’t heard that from any other big AI spender. “I’m starting to see the first clues that we’re seeing an end to the increases in capital expenditure,” he said. On price, he called the stock “ridiculously cheap” at 14.4 times forward earnings, “the cheapest Meta Platforms has been trading for according to this valuation metric going back many, many years,” and put intrinsic value at “$872” against a market price of “$533.” “It wasn’t a great quarter, but given the share price decline and given the fact that the stock price was already so low to begin with, I still see this as the best opportunity in the market right now,” he said. “I’m reiterating my buy rating with a high conviction on Meta Platform stock.” He owns the stock, said he was interested in adding more, and allowed that “I might be early on this call.”

Chris Sain

Meta was trading at $599 the day Chris Sain covered it, after getting "rejected at around 611," and he told his audience not to buy it there. His entry sits lower: "in the high 400s to the $500 range, you want to scoop this up." The target he keeps repeating is $1,000. "Coach personally has a $1,000 price target on this, and because I'm so strongly convicted in this, I don't want you guys to miss it," he said. From that entry, a $1,000 print would be a double, and he argued the trade still pays well short of it: "even if it just goes to 700, 800, that is still a massive ROI." The litigation didn't move him. It's "always an overhang, a dark cloud over Meta," he said. "But when those clouds clear, they run into clear blue skies."

Financial Education (Jeremy Lefebvre)

Jeremy Lefebvre owns Meta and has for years. He was not telling anyone to buy it. "I am not bullish on the short term of Meta," he said. His objection is the money Meta is spending to build AI data centers. "They have a spending problem. It's not getting better. It's going to likely get worse before it gets better," he said. Earnings per share are already declining, he said, with the depreciation on that spending still to come and "some brutal comps coming up next year." He named the one stock he would own for three years without selling. Meta got an honorable mention. Netflix got the money, because Netflix carries none of "the out-of-control capex that you have to worry about with a stock like a Meta or an Amazon." He does expect Meta to pay off one day. He puts it at "$1,000, $2,000" eventually, against a stock that spent August in the $500s and $600s, and says he would not hold a share otherwise. Zuckerberg's spending, he said, "took a $1,000 right out the window. That was like, nope, that ain't happening anytime soon."

While the resolution of the lawsuit is a step in the right direction for Zuck and META, it is far from the only issue plaguing the company. The recovery story is still not clear. META and the rest of the Mag7 continue to fuel the AI infrastructure buildout with massive CapEx, and there is no clue when they will cut spending. Even worse, there is no clear picture of how all this CapEx will lead to higher profits for the company. For now, short-term volatility continues.

As of the day of writing, META closed at 670.24 per share, up more than 20% from its 540 per share lows. For now, it looks like all our META bulls above got it right in the short term.

Do you agree with these META bulls?