Yesterday I saw Meta drop 7% in after-hours despite beating revenue targets. I mean, the numbers were good: $56.31 billion in revenue versus $55.45 billion expected, net profit rose 61% to $26.77 billion. But the stock market didn't like it and sold everything off. I quickly understood why when I read the details.

Traders were concerned about two main points. First, daily active user growth slowed compared to the previous quarter — Meta blamed disruptions in Russia and Iran, but it still scared the market. Second, capital expenditures increased significantly: now the forecast is between $125 billion and $145 billion for 2026, well above the $115 billion to $135 billion they previously said. The company justified this with higher component prices and data center costs for AI.

The interesting thing is that looking at the rest of the numbers, the situation is quite solid. Revenue grew 33% year over year, operating margin remained steady at 41%, operating cash flow was $32.23 billion. Meta returned $1.35 billion in dividends and has $81.18 billion in cash. So from a fundamentalist perspective, it shouldn’t have sold off so much.

But that’s how the stock market works — sometimes an unexpected number (weak user growth) weighs more than everything else combined. Zuckerberg said they had a strong quarter with the launch of Meta Superintelligence Labs, and the forecast for Q2 is revenue between $58 billion and $61 billion. Let’s see if the stock market recovers once traders better process this data.