In November 2022, shares of Meta Platforms (NASDAQ: META) hit US$88. The company formerly known as Facebook had lost three-quarters of its value. Wall Street was in full panic mode. The metaverse was a money pit. TikTok was eating its lunch. Apple’s privacy changes had kneecapped its advertising business. Every headline screamed the same thing: Mark Zuckerberg has lost the plot. At that point, it was tempting to agree. But here’s what the market missed. Underneath all the noise, Meta still had close to two billion daily users. Its advertising platform remained dominant. And the company was still generating enormous amounts of free cash flow. In other words, the business wasn’t broken — the narrative was.

Three buys, zero perfect timing

The Smart All Stars Portfolio bought shares of Meta for the first time in March 2022 at around US$202. That was months BEFORE the bottom. Shares would go on to fall another 56%, all the way down to US$88....