So, you're looking at the price of fb shares and wondering if the "buy the dip" mantra still holds any water in 2026. Honestly, it’s a bit of a rollercoaster. If you haven’t checked your portfolio lately, Meta Platforms (the company we still basically all call Facebook) is trading around $620.25 as of mid-January. It’s a far cry from that euphoric peak of $788.82 we saw back in August 2025.
Why the slide? It isn't just one thing. It's a messy cocktail of massive spending, AI anxiety, and the fact that Mark Zuckerberg is currently betting the entire farm on data centers.
The $70 Billion Question: Why is the Stock Sweating?
Wall Street is currently obsessed with "CapEx"—capital expenditure. In plain English: it's the amount of cash Meta is burning to buy the specialized chips and servers needed to run their AI. Last year, they guided for a spend of roughly $70 to $72 billion. For 2026, they’ve already warned investors that this number is going to grow "notably larger."
When a company tells you they are going to spend more than the GDP of some small countries on hardware, investors get twitchy.
The fear is simple. If all this spending on "Meta Superintelligence" doesn't immediately translate into more people clicking on ads, the profit margins are going to get squeezed. Hard. We saw a glimpse of this in the Q3 2025 results. Revenue was up a healthy 26%, hitting over $51 billion, but the stock still took a hit because the "bill" for the future is coming due now.
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Revenue is still a beast
Despite the price drop, the core business—Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp—is still a literal money printer.
- Ad Impressions: Up 14% year-over-year.
- Price per Ad: Up 10%.
- Daily Active People (DAP): Sitting at a massive 3.54 billion.
Basically, half the planet uses a Meta product every single day. That kind of reach is why analysts like those at Rosenblatt are still screaming "Buy" with price targets as high as $1,117. They see the current price as a discount on a company that owns the digital town square.
What's Actually Driving the Price of FB Shares Today?
If you're trying to time an entry or decide whether to bail, you've got to look at the "Lattice" architecture. No, it’s not a garden feature. It’s Meta’s new AI ad-ranking system.
By consolidating hundreds of old, clunky models into a few high-powered ones, they’ve managed to make ads way more effective. This is the "hidden" driver of the stock. When ads work better, advertisers pay more. It’s the reason why, even with TikTok breathing down their neck, Meta’s revenue per user continues to climb.
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The Dividend Factor
For the longest time, "FB shares" meant growth, not income. That changed. Meta now pays a quarterly dividend of $0.53 per share. It’s not much—a yield of about 0.34%—but it’s a signal. It says, "We’re a mature company now, and we can afford to pay you to wait while we build the metaverse."
Reality Labs: The Black Hole
We can't talk about the price of fb shares without mentioning the elephant in the room: Reality Labs. This is the division making the Quest headsets and those Ray-Ban smart glasses. It is losing money. A lot of it.
In 2025, the operating loss for this segment was roughly $18 billion.
Zuckerberg is playing a long game. A very long game. He wants to own the next computing platform so he doesn't have to play by Apple's or Google's rules anymore. If you believe AR glasses will replace the smartphone by 2030, then $620 a share looks like a steal. If you think it’s a pipe dream, that $18 billion annual loss is a giant red flag.
The Competition Narrative
TikTok is still the main rival for attention, but the "TikTok ban" talk in the US acts like a permanent shadow-catalyst for Meta. Any time the legal pressure on TikTok increases, Meta shares tend to catch a bid. Why? Because Instagram Reels is the most natural lifeboat for those creators and advertisers.
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Actionable Insights for Investors
So, what do you actually do with this information?
First, ignore the "all-time high" noise. The market in 2026 is repricing all of Big Tech based on who can actually make money from AI, not just who can talk about it. Meta is currently one of the "cheapest" of the Magnificent Seven based on its forward P/E ratio, which sits around 24x to 27x depending on which analyst’s earnings estimate you trust.
- Check the Margins: Keep a close eye on the operating margin in the next earnings report. If it stays above 35% despite the massive spending, the stock is likely to floor.
- Watch the Capex: If management raises the 2026 spending guidance again without showing a corresponding jump in ad revenue, expect more downward pressure.
- The "Smart Glasses" Metric: Pay attention to third-party data on Ray-Ban Meta sales. If these become a legitimate consumer hit, it justifies the billions spent on Reality Labs and could lead to a major "rerating" of the stock.
The price of fb shares is currently caught between two worlds: the incredibly profitable social media past and the expensive, uncertain AI future. Buying now is essentially a bet on Mark Zuckerberg’s ability to execute a second "Year of Efficiency" while simultaneously building the world's most powerful AI infrastructure. It’s risky, sure. But for a company that touches 3.5 billion people, betting against them has historically been a losing move.
Keep your position sizes sensible and don't get shaken out by the daily volatility. The real story here isn't the price today, but where those $70 billion in chips take the company by 2027.