Should You Buy Meta Platforms Stock Before April 30?

Meta Platforms (META -6.74%) is the parent company of social networks including Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp, which serve more than 3.3 billion people every single day. The company is coming off of a spectacular year of earnings growth in 2024, and it’s scheduled to report its financial results for the first quarter of 2025 (ended March 31) on April 30.

Investors can expect to learn more about Meta’s growing portfolio of artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives, which are powering brand-new features and helping the company target users with relevant content more effectively.

Meta’s stock price is down 24% from its all-time high amid the sell-off in the broader market, which was triggered by the tariffs President Donald Trump imposed on America’s trading partners over the past week. The stock is now trading at an attractive valuation, so could this be a great entry point for investors ahead of the April 30 report? Let’s dive in.

Meta is quickly becoming a leader in AI

Meta generates almost all of its revenue by showing ads to users of its social media platforms. Therefore, the longer each user spends online, the more ads they see, and the more money the company makes. AI is one of the tools Meta is using to boost engagement; complex algorithms are learning what sort of content each user enjoys viewing on Facebook and Instagram, and those algorithms use that information to place more of it in their feeds.

Toward the end of 2024, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors this strategy was driving an increase in the amount of time users were spending on Facebook and Instagram. But the company’s use of AI doesn’t end there — it also launched a new feature called Meta AI last year, which is a virtual assistant users can access through all of Meta’s social networks. It’s capable of answering questions on a variety of topics, and it can join your group chat to settle debates with your friends or suggest fun activities.

Meta AI had 700 million monthly active users at the end of 2024, which means it’s already one of the world’s most popular AI chatbots. That figure was up by a whopping 50% from the third quarter just three months earlier, so adoption is scaling very quickly.

Meta AI is built on Meta’s Llama family of open-source large language models (LLMs), which are among the most widely deployed in the industry. The company recently launched the most powerful variants so far, including Llama 4 Behemoth which outperforms other leading models like OpenAI’s GPT-4.5, Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet, and Alphabet‘s Gemini 2.0 across several benchmarks.

Since the Llama models are open-source, Meta can lean on millions of independent developers to help find bugs and improve their performance. Moreover, the company plans to spend up to $65 billion on data center infrastructure and chips this year, which will provide the necessary computing power to continue advancing the models. As Llama continues to improve, features like Meta AI will grow “smarter” over time, which will encourage more usage and boost engagement.

Meta’s earnings could slow in Q1

Meta generated a record $164.5 billion in total revenue during 2024, which was a 22% increase compared to the prior year. That was the fastest growth rate since 2021, and it marked an acceleration from the 16% increase the company delivered in 2023.

Meta achieved that strong result despite its efforts to carefully manage costs to improve its profitability. The company’s overall operating expenses only increased by 8% during 2024, and since revenue grew far more quickly, a lot more money flowed to the bottom line. Meta’s net income soared by 59% to a record $62.3 billion for the year, which translated to $23.86 in earnings per share (EPS).

However, according to Wall Street’s consensus forecast (provided by Yahoo! Finance), Meta’s earnings growth could decelerate significantly in 2025. Analysts expect the company’s earnings to increase by 11% in the first quarter, and just 4.6% for the full year.

Two things could drive the potential slowdown. First, Meta recently warned investors of a substantial increase in its expenses during 2025 because of the major investments it’s making in AI infrastructure and chips. Although it will be a headwind in the short term, the increased spending could pay off in the future. Meta has proven its ability to successfully monetize new features over the years, including Stories and Reels, to name just two. If the company continues to release new AI tools that scale as quickly as Meta AI has so far, it could be sitting on a gold mine in the long run when it decides to monetize them.

The second driver is a potential slowdown in the economy. Several top economists and key Wall Street figures, including JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, see a recession on the horizon. The tariffs President Trump has imposed over the last couple of weeks will significantly raise the price of many products consumers buy each day, which could trigger a slowdown in economic activity. Companies typically try to cut costs in recessions, and marketing budgets are often one of the first line items to trim. That could be a detriment to Meta’s business.

With that said, economists at Goldman Sachs lowered their forecast for a recession back to 45% on Wednesday after Trump announced a 90-day pause on many of the “reciprocal” tariffs he enacted on specific countries (he kept the 10% universal import tax on goods coming in and raised tariffs on Chinese products to 125%). Goldman Sachs still thinks a recession could occur, but it’s no longer definite based on the latest assessment.

Should you buy Meta stock before April 30?

The recent sell-off in the broader market has presented investors with a great opportunity to buy Meta stock at a very attractive valuation. It currently trades at a price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio of just 21.3, which is a 16% discount to its five-year average of 25.3.

Moreover, it means Meta stock is 21% cheaper than the Nasdaq-100 index, which hosts most of the company’s big-tech peers and trades at a P/E ratio of 27.2 as of this writing.

Data by YCharts.

In other words, the prospect of slower earnings growth in the upcoming first-quarter report on April 30 doesn’t feel like much of a deterrent considering Meta’s current valuation. If the weakness does extend beyond Q1 as a result of a broader economic slowdown, that could be a cause for concern. However, the U.S. economy is so large and complex that it’s nearly impossible to make investment decisions on individual stocks based on predictions about macroeconomic performance — as I highlighted earlier, even key personnel at two of America’s top investment banks have expressed conflicting views in the last few days alone.

As a result, setting April 30 aside and buying Meta stock with the intention of holding it for the next three-to-five years might be the best play for investors.

After all, this isn’t the first time Trump has used tariffs to manipulate the economy. He enacted a series of tariffs in 2018 that led to a near-20% drop in the S&P 500 index, but the market (and the broader economy) made a full recovery and went on to set several new record highs in the years that followed.

This time probably won’t be any different, so investors who are willing to look past the short-term uncertainty could do extremely well in the long run if they buy high-quality stocks like Meta amid the weakness.