Meta Platforms has passed its May 27 earnings event with the stock holding up — and the options market's pre-earnings bullishness now looks vindicated, even as analysts quietly trim their targets.
The options signal has been the dominant story for two weeks, and it remains so. The put/call ratio closed Tuesday at 0.4588 — the 52-week low, fractionally below the 0.4723 print that previously held that record. That places it nearly 2.4 standard deviations below its 20-day mean of 0.487. There is no defensive hedging, no late-breaking rotation into puts. For context, the 52-week high on this ratio was 0.81 — almost double the current reading. That gap describes the full range of sentiment this stock has seen over the past year, and right now it is parked at the bullish extreme.
Short interest is low enough to be a footnote. The position ticked up to 1.33% of the free float — a 10% build over the past month but still the kind of level that generates no meaningful squeeze pressure. The borrow market reinforces that: cost to borrow is 0.41%, well off its intra-month peak near 0.56% and up from under 0.20% seen in early May, but nowhere near territory that signals conviction from short sellers. Availability is essentially unlimited — the lending pool holds well over a billion shares available against under 29 million borrowed. The short story here is simply not interesting, and that is itself informative.
The Street's reaction to Q1 results tells a more nuanced story. JPMorgan's Doug Anmuth moved to Neutral from Overweight on April 30, cutting his target from $825 to $725 — the most directionally significant move in the recent analyst activity. Beyond that, the pattern across Wells Fargo, Mizuho, Stifel, UBS, TD Cowen, Bernstein, and Piper Sandler was uniform: ratings held, targets trimmed by $20–$80. The consensus stays at Buy with 49 firms positive, and the mean price target at $827 implies roughly 35% upside from the current $612 print. That gap is wide, though it reflects targets set before the stock fell nearly 9% after the last earnings report. Valuation has softened: the trailing P/E contracted about 3 turns over the past month to 18x, and P/B has pulled back by roughly 0.7x. EV/EBITDA eased as well. The factor picture balances strong EPS momentum scores (78th and 75th percentile on 30-day and 90-day measures) against a value score in the 36th percentile — the multiple compression this month has improved the setup but has not yet made the stock cheap.
CFO Susan Li and CTO Andrew Bosworth each sold shares on May 18 — Li in seven tranches totalling roughly $5.6 million, Bosworth in three tranches totalling about $1.4 million. The significance scores are low (2 out of 10), and the 90-day net across all insiders is a modest net positive of $11.3 million in value terms. These look like routine plan-based sales rather than a directional signal.
The stock fell 8.9% on the day after Q1 results and has not recovered that gap — the price is down 9.3% over the past month to $612, despite a 1.6% bounce this week. GOOGL gained 1.5% on Tuesday and is broadly flat on the week. SNAP added 0.5% on the day and is up roughly 1.4% on the week, a similar recovery profile. The next scheduled earnings event is July 22. Between now and then, the key watch is whether the put/call ratio begins to normalise upward from its 52-week floor — any rotation into protective puts as July approaches would mark the first meaningful shift in options sentiment since early April.
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