Out of many economic slowdown indicators, packaging demand is insightful. To this end, International Paper (NYSE:IP) confirmed layoffs on Monday affecting hundreds of employees, and the permanent closure of facilities in Missouri, Tennessee, North Carolina and Illinois.
Yet, that doesn’t mean investors should conflate categories. Companies catering to the digital realm are going strong, with no signs of slowing down. Despite their currently high price levels, here is how investors should look at three major digital tech stocks that recently hit all-time highs with their stock price.
Nvidia
On Tuesday, NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) stock briefly reached a new all-time high of $144 per share. Year-to-date, NVDA shares are up 200%, continuing the outstanding gains streak after the 10-for-1 stock split in June. On November 20th, the company is scheduled to release its Q3 results for the fiscal year 2025.
Throughout the year, Nvidia beat all earnings per share (EPS) estimates, with the last one ending July at 8.33% positive surprise. For the next quarter, 14 analysts expect $0.69 EPS per Zacks Investment Research. Compared to the year-ago quarter’s $0.38 EPS, this would be an 81% improvement.
This is in line with Nvidia’s 168% year-over-year net income increase to $16.6 billion in the last quarter. But is there room for equally rapid growth moving forward? In October’s investor presentation, Nvidia posits that “the entire computing stack has been reinvented”.
Although this upgrade of traditional data centers already poured massive capital inflows, Nvidia is counting on so-called AI Factories to double data center footprint to $2 trillion in the near future. Nvidia gained the first mover advantage here across all computing stacks: data processing, computer vision, science, deep learning, recommender systems, speech AI and agentic & physical AI.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang reiterated in early October that Blackwell orders are “insane” from both the Big Tech and AI startups, within a price range of $30k to $40k per chip. Although long-term NVDA holders would be wise to realize their gains at this point, this means that more NVDA upside is likely.
The current Wall Street consensus on average NVDA price target, twelve months ahead, is $154.86 per share. Last Friday, Bank of America’s analyst Vivek Arya raised his target from $165 to $190, which is close to the upper forecast ceiling of $200 per share.
Meta Platforms
As Nvidia churns out more chips for future AI products, Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ:META) puts them into practice across its giant social media ecosystem. In early October, META stock reached its all-time high of $595.94, now priced at $581.18 per share. Year-to-date, META shares are up 61%.
This is not surprising as the company adopted Apple’s approach of massive stock buybacks. In February this year, Meta authorized an additional $50 billion in share repurchases, following the $30.93 billion executed by December 2023. This was also Meta’s first dividend issuance at $0.50 quarterly ($2 annually), incentivizing META shareholders to keep holding.
Meta Platforms is scheduled to release its Q3 earnings result at the end of the month, on October 30th. Like Nvidia, the company beat EPS estimates during the year, with the last quarter showing 9.79% surprise. For the next quarter, analysts’ EPS consensus is $5.17 vs the $4.39 in the year-ago quarter, representing nearly 18% valuation growth.
In Q2, Meta decreased its personnel count by 1% YoY, but increased average price per ad by 10% for the same period. Alongside other revenue sources, offset by $8,47 billion capex, Meta tracked a 73% YoY net income increase, from $7.8 billion to $13.5 billion.
Although Meta’s revenue growth is slower than Nvidia’s, at 22% YoY, it is clear that the company will continue to cut personnel expenses. After all, X (Twitter) paved the road for this trend when Elon Musk layed off 80% of the workforce, without it impacting the app’s functionality.
But with Reality Labs still generating losses, the Meta in metaverse is yet to materialize as Mark Zuckerberg expected. Overall, this makes for a good exit point for META stock at this high price point. The average META price target is $627 per share based on 45 analyst inputs per Nasdaq forecasting data. This 8.5% upside is likely to be greater if investors wait for the next stock market correction.
Netflix
A week ago, the long-term deep dive on Netflix Inc (NASDAQ:NFLX) was bullish. This was proven correct after the company’s latest Q3 earnings report. Consequently, NFLX shares went up from $706.71 to today’s $763.12 per share.
The Q3 report showed strong ad-tier growth and revenue growth at 15% YoY. The streaming platform beat EPS estimate with 6% surprise, at $5.4 reported vs $5.09 estimated. For Q4, Netflix expects YoY growth to be slightly lower at 14.7% and operating margin to decrease from Q3’s record high of 29.6% to 21.6%.
Consequently, investors are likely to see a NFLX dip in the coming months, but this shouldn’t distract from the company’s strong fundamentals and cornering of the streaming market, pulling ahead of Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) Prime Video and Disney+.
When that price correction happens, investors can look forward to an average NFLX price target of $786.34 per share, based on 42 analyst inputs aggregated by Nasdaq.
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Neither the author, Tim Fries, nor this website, The Tokenist, provide financial advice. Please consult our website policy prior to making financial decisions.