This Stock Is the Biggest Winner of the Bull Market

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Dec 14, 10:50AM EST

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This Stock Is the Biggest Winner of the Bull Market — © DNY59 / Getty Images

Based on weight, the S&P 500 has been dominated by a few stocks for several years: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft. From time to time, Tesla gets thrown into the group, and Nvidia has been recently. Yet, the big five continue to rule the list regarding index performance. (These companies have the best reputations.)

Why Meta Is the Bull Market Winner

One stock among these five is the bull market winner so far, and that is Meta Platforms Inc. (NASDAQ: META | META Price Prediction). Its share price is up 178% in the past year, compared to an increase of 15% for the S&P 500. Meta was on the ropes recently in a way the others in the group were not. It has almost completely recovered from modest revenue growth, attacks about how it controls content, sales of its data and the departure of its famous second in command. The most damaging of these was the departure of Sheryl Sandberg, who had been at the company for 14 years and ran it daily for founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Sandberg left in June 2022.

Nothing marks the turnaround as well as Meta’s financials. In the most recently reported quarter, its revenue rose 23% to $34.1 billion. Net income rose 164% to $11.6 billion. The figures were almost as impressive for the first nine months of the year. Revenue reached $94.8 billion, while net income for the nine months was $25.1 billion.

The numbers may be as good as or better for the current quarter. The year’s final quarter is often the largest for advertising, which is the foundation of Meta’s revenue.

The company also made a move late last year that investors applauded but employees did not. It cut 11,000 people, which drove savings this year.

Wall Street sold Meta in 2022 because its Reality Labs business has lost the company billions of dollars. It continues to lose money, but Meta appears to believe that this unit is not the engine of short-term growth. Investors appreciated the company’s candidness.

Can Meta outpace the stock price growth of America’s big tech companies next year? A great deal has to do with the health of the ad market. As the chance of a recession recedes, the odds of continued growth in that sector are still good.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.