Meta's stock, recently trading near $709 after a sharp pullback from highs above $770, faces its biggest near-term test with third-quarter earnings due October 21. Traders are watching whether strong advertising revenue growth, fueled by rising user engagement across Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, will offset heavy AI infrastructure spending exceeding $100 billion this year. Recent releases of the Muse Wonder family of frontier large language models, which Meta claims outperform rivals on select agentic and reasoning benchmarks, have lifted sentiment around monetization potential via subscriptions and APIs. Analyst targets cluster above $800 amid expectations for continued AI-driven ad improvements, though capex concerns and any earnings miss could pressure the price through month-end.