Facebook was raised to Outperform from Neutral at Credit Suisse, and the firm said that it is now time to rebuild your Facebook models. Earnings estimates were raised, and the price target was lifted to $87 from $65 in the call. This is only $3 shy of the street highest price target of $90. Credit Suisse’s investment case is based on the following comments:
Our point of differentiation with this report is in the explicit product-by-product deep dive and projections for existing desktop and mobile products, as well as the upcoming Premium Video ad unit and Graph Search versus the simplistic ARPU growth assumption. This analysis leads us to conclude the following key motivators for our ratings change: 1) Facebook will be able to drive revenue growth without a material lift in ad loads, 2) Street models are too conservative and underestimate the long-term monetization potential of upcoming new products, 3) optionality and upward bias to estimates do not contemplate contributions from multiple other products (Offers, 3P mobile ad network, etc.).
The polar opposite of this screaming Buy rating is that the put options volume was through the roof on Monday. The January 2015 $45 puts saw more than 30,000 contracts trade, a fully leveraged bet for the equivalent of some 3 million shares. This was almost certainly a hedging transaction of sorts, and we have deeper analysis of the put options transaction from live data based on Monday’s closing bell.
Facebook is expected to post earnings of $0.24 per share from normalized operations (double from a year ago) and revenue is expected to be $2.36 billion (up from $1.46 billion a year ago).
Facebook shares closed up almost 4% at $61.24 on Monday, and they were indicated up another 2% or so at $62.64 Tuesday morning after the credit Suisse upgrade. Facebook shares have a 52-week range of $22.67 to $72.59.
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