META has monetization power, not just pricing power: ad prices up 12% and impressions up 14% year over year drove ad revenue up 27%, with growth in every region. The quarter should be strong, but another capex guidance raise could spook investors; META is still worth holding through the capex cycle.

For example, we have companies like SpaceX and Netflix and Meta and Tesla all reporting over the next couple of days, plus a lot of other ones.

Next, we move on to Wednesday aftermarket close and we get into Meta and Tesla. Let's go ahead and take a look at Meta. Meta is an interesting company because you view it as more of an auction company, but they have real pricing power.

The prices of advertising on Meta's products continually climb every single quarter. Here's the average ad price year-over-year in the past four quarters. It went from Q2 2025 plus 9%.

Then plus 10% plus 6% plus 12% last quarter it was plus 12%.

So Meta is getting more money per ad on their service. Now this is not because they're showing fewer ads. In fact, the opposite is true. They're showing more ads. So, Meta is getting more money per ad while showing more ads.

Ad impressions are up 14% year-over-year. The average ad price is up 12%. Total advertising revenue is up 27%. It's a very powerful mix when you have a product that the price is getting higher and you're selling more and more of them every single quarter.

Now, I would call this pricing power, but that gives you the impression that Meta is like raising prices. Like they're the ones deciding as if they're a software company what advertisers will pay.

It's just advertisers bidding against themselves. So instead of pricing power, I would refer to this as monetization power.

Even though they're not directly raising prices, Meta is creating an environment where they get more money from more of their customers while selling more inventory at the same time.

And they are doing that intentionally. They are doing it by making higher returns on their advertising, making it easier to advertise on their product, more agentic tools to create more targeted ads.

They're making their service more entertaining, so people stay on them longer, watch more ads in the process, and those ads convert better.

And I think in this case, monetization power is better than pricing power because this isn't a situation where Meta has a captive audience and they are just edging the price up quarter after quarter.

No, they are making the entire environment better, their products better, their services better, they're showing more ads, and people are willingly paying more money for it.

The meta numbers are insane. in their daily active people growth continues to grow. Their advertising impression growth continues to grow every single quarter. You can even see it start to speed back up in 2025.

These are all the different regions. The revenue by geography is also diversified. So, this company's growing in every quadrant of planet earth. They're making money everywhere where people have internet connections.

Met is widely adopted with different products across the globe. All of this looks amazing.

But with this quarter, I think investors are going to go, "All right, the business is amazing. Muse is amazing. All of this looks good, but how much money are you spending on capex?

I think they're going to raise their capex guidance again. I think it's going to potentially spook investors. That's the big calculation I make this quarter.

Going into it, Meta is clearly going to have a super strong quarter, but investors will be scratching their heads of whether or not Mark Zuckerberg is really spending too much on capex.

And for me, I think this one is well worth holding through the capex cycle.