'Meta is having its moment' as stock's monster rally vindicates the bulls: Chart of the Day

If there's one stock that has repeatedly shown it knows how to make a comeback, it's Meta Platforms ( META ).

The company's launch of its wildly popular AI agent Muse has catapulted the stock roughly 16% this week, with shares sitting just $10 away from their August 2025 all-time closing high, as shown on Yahoo Finance's AlphaSpace chart below .

"Meta is having its moment," Justin Patterson, KeyBanc managing director, told Yahoo Finance on Thursday. The analyst has an Outperform rating on the stock and just raised his price target to $900 after the Muse announcement.

"When I look at where the stock is right now, you're really back to historical PE levels," Patterson said. KeyBanc's profit forecasts place Meta's current valuation at 21x to 23x forward earnings.

The ride to get here had its ups and downs. Throughout 2026, ballooning AI investments and falling free cash flow have spooked investors. The existential threat of social media addiction claims, which the company finally settled with 47 states in August , was also an overhang.

In April, the stock fell more than 8% in a single day after the company announced plans to increase its AI spending, partly due to higher input costs.

In late July, Meta stock dropped another 8%, with one analyst calling the company's quarterly results "barely passable."

Not to mention the criticism the company endured over the years for its Metaverse initiative, which cost the company more than $73 billion over five years .

"A lot of investors still had some pretty raw feelings going back to the Reality Labs investments," Futurum CEO Daniel Newman told Yahoo Finance.

And in February 2022, on the stock's worst day on record, the stock plunged more than 26% after Meta reported its first-ever quarterly decline in daily active users and warned that an Apple iOS privacy change would wipe out $10 billion in ad revenue.

Shares didn't bottom out until October of that year, only to recover all the way into the following year.

Those low points in the stock price, when investors panic, tend to be times when CEO Mark Zuckerberg cuts costs, pivots, and reanchors.

"We know something about Mark [Zuckerberg], he does listen to investors," Newman said. "He does eventually come around."

Ines Ferre is a senior business reporter for Yahoo Finance.