A share price chart that covers fourteen years looks like one long climb when you shrink it to fit a phone screen. Up close it is a string of sharp falls and long recoveries, and the deepest falls usually had a reason that felt like the end of the story at the time.
That is what makes a long price history hard to use. Data sites give you thousands of daily closes with no explanation, while news stories explain a single day and stop. Neither tells you how deep a fall went, how long the climb back took, or whether the whole market was falling with it.
Reading the history as a set of cycles fixes that. You measure each fall from a high to its lowest close, and each climb from that low to the next high. Then you pin down the dated news behind each cycle's biggest days. A few numbers per cycle, set beside the same dates for the wider market, turn a wall of prices into a story you can check.
Meta Platforms (META), the company that listed in 2012 as Facebook (FB), has gone through several of these swings in its first fourteen years. BloFin lists tokenized Meta (METAX) as the METAX/USDT Spot market, and you can trade the share's price with leverage through the METAUSDT Perpetual. Both follow the share price behind every one of those cycles.
What is Meta's stock price history?
Meta's stock price history runs from Facebook's $38 listing price on May 18, 2012 to a close of $648.85 on October 22, 2026, about 17.1 times the listing price. In between, the share set a record close of $790.00 on August 12, 2025 and suffered a 76.7% fall in 2021 and 2022 (source: Yahoo Finance META history).
That fall was the deepest of six drops of a third or more, and every big climb came after one of them. Each of the four main falls, and the climb after it, can be set beside the Nasdaq-100 over the same dates, measured with the Invesco QQQ fund that tracks the index. The gap between the two shows how much of each move was Meta's own (source: Yahoo Finance QQQ history).
Cycle | Start | End | Meta's move | Nasdaq-100 over the same dates |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Fall after the listing | May 18, 2012 (listing price $38.00) | September 4, 2012 ($17.73) | −53.3% | +12.0% |
Climb to the 2018 record | September 4, 2012 ($17.73) | July 25, 2018 ($217.50) | +1,126.7% | +168.5% |
2018 fall | July 25, 2018 ($217.50) | December 24, 2018 ($124.06) | −43.0% | −21.5% |
Climb to the 2021 record | December 24, 2018 ($124.06) | September 7, 2021 ($382.18) | +208.1% | +166.3% |
2021 to 2022 crash | September 7, 2021 ($382.18) | November 3, 2022 ($88.91) | −76.7% | −31.8% |
Climb to the 2025 record | November 3, 2022 ($88.91) | August 12, 2025 ($790.00) | +788.5% | +122.7% |
Fall to the 2026 low | August 12, 2025 ($790.00) | March 27, 2026 ($525.72) | −33.5% | −3.0% |
2026 rebound | March 27, 2026 ($525.72) | September 24, 2026 ($777.59) | +47.9% | +31.7% |
The market comparison matters, because where Meta and the Nasdaq-100 fell together, as in 2018, part of the drop came from the market itself (source: Yahoo Finance QQQ history). Where the market barely moved, as from August 2025 to March 2026, almost all of the fall belonged to Meta. Two shorter falls sit inside the climbs: a 34.6% drop from January to March 2020, and a 34.2% fall from February to April 2025.
The biggest single days inside those cycles came on news you can date, most of it Meta's own results reports. Other dated news hit the share hard too, such as the Cambridge Analytica scandal in March 2018 and the jury verdicts in March 2026. Results, scandals and court rulings are the main kinds of news that move Meta's stock price.
Facebook's IPO price and the 2012 fall
Facebook's initial public offering (IPO) price was $38 a share. At that price the company and its early holders sold 421,233,615 shares, and trading began on Nasdaq on May 18, 2012 (source: Meta Investor Relations). That made it a $16.0 billion offering, of which about $6.8 billion went to Facebook for the 180,000,000 new shares it sold. The share closed its first day at $38.23, just 0.6% above the listing price.
The first morning went wrong for technical reasons before the price fell. A design limitation in Nasdaq's system for matching buy and sell orders disrupted the listing. The Securities and Exchange Commission later fined Nasdaq $10 million, the largest penalty it had ever set against an exchange (source: SEC). The share opened at $42.05, 10.7% above the listing price, but its low for the day was exactly $38.00.
The bigger question was phones. By the end of September 2012, 604 million people used Facebook on mobile, 61% more than a year earlier, yet mobile brought in just 14% of its ad revenue that quarter (source: Facebook third-quarter 2012 results). Users were moving to phones faster than the ads followed them. By September 4, 2012 the price had fallen to $17.73, less than half the $38 listing price.
Mobile ads then grew quickly. Within three quarters their share of Facebook's ad revenue had climbed to about 41%, in the second quarter of 2013, when total revenue grew 53% (source: Facebook second-quarter 2013 results). The share closed back above $38 for the first time on August 2, 2013, 441 days after its first trade, and kept climbing for the next five years.
Say you had bought $1,000 of stock at the $38 listing price. That buys about 26.32 shares, which would have been worth $466.58 at the September 2012 low and $17,075.00 at the October 22, 2026 close, before dividends (source: Yahoo Finance META history). Meta has never split its stock, so those old and new prices compare directly. On October 21, 2026, Meta announced a one-time stock dividend that hands holders a new non-voting Class C share for every share they own, to be paid after its new charter takes effect on January 19, 2027 (source: Meta third-quarter 2026 results). Meta expects the share price to reflect a two-for-one split after that payment, so split-adjusted charts would then show older prices at half their traded level, as Meta's stock split history explains.
2018: Cambridge Analytica and a record one-day loss
Meta's 2018 fall came in two parts, a privacy scandal in March and a weak results report in July, and together they took the share 43.0% below its record. The March leg took 17.8% off the price between March 16 and March 27, and the July leg started a far larger slide.
In March 2018, reports revealed that the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica had gathered data from more than 50 million Facebook users. On Monday, March 19, the share fell 6.8%, cutting nearly $40 billion from Facebook's market value (source: CBS News). By March 27 it had closed at $152.22, its low for the spring.
The share recovered quickly and set a record close of $217.50 on July 25, 2018, the day Facebook reported its second quarter. The report showed user growth flat in the US and the rest of North America, and Facebook warned that revenue growth would slow sharply. Analysts largely blamed the weak user numbers on Europe's new privacy rules. On July 26 the shares closed almost 19% lower at $176.26. That wiped $119 billion off Facebook's market value, which the Associated Press called the largest one-day loss in market history (source: Associated Press via ABC7).
That one day took $41.24 off each share, and the slide then ran on into a falling market until the share closed at $124.06 on December 24, 2018. Over the same dates the Nasdaq-100 fell 21.5%, so roughly half of Meta's 43.0% fall matched the market, while the rest was its own. The share first closed above $217.50 again on January 9, 2020.
The 2020 dip and the 2021 record
Meta's climb from the 2018 low to its 2021 record added 208.1% in under three years, even with a sharp early-2020 drop in the middle. The share went from $124.06 in late December 2018 to a record close of $382.18 on September 7, 2021, about ten times the 2012 listing price.
Over the whole climb from December 2018 to September 2021 the Nasdaq-100 rose 166.3%, so this cycle ran much closer to the market than the climbs before and after it. The early-2020 dip was short and mostly market-wide. From January 29 to March 16, 2020, the share fell 34.6% while the Nasdaq-100 fell 23.7%. By May 20, 2020 it had closed above its January high again, about two months after the low.
The record came seven weeks before the rebrand from Facebook to Meta, which the company announced on October 28, 2021 (source: Meta Investor Relations ticker notice). The name pointed at the metaverse, the shared virtual worlds Meta planned to build, and the spending behind that plan became one of the reasons the next fall went so deep.
Why did Meta stock drop in 2022?
Meta stock dropped in 2022 because three problems landed at once. Its daily users fell for the first time, Apple's privacy changes cut into ad revenue, and metaverse spending climbed just as interest rates were expected to rise. The share lost 76.7% between its September 2021 record and its low close of $88.91 in November 2022.
The first big blow came on February 3, 2022, the day after Meta's fourth-quarter 2021 report. The shares fell 26.4% and erased more than $230 billion of market value, the biggest one-day loss for a US company at the time (source: The Guardian). Meta had reported its first drop in daily users, warned that Apple's privacy changes would cost it billions, and posted lower profit as metaverse costs rose. Investors already expected the Federal Reserve to raise rates, which weighs on technology stocks, and Zuckerberg admitted that TikTok was competing hard for the same attention.
The second blow came after the third-quarter report, when the shares fell 24.6% to $97.94 on October 27, 2022. Revenue had dropped 4% from a year earlier while Zuckerberg kept spending heavily on the metaverse (source: NPR). That spending runs through Meta's Reality Labs, the unit that holds its metaverse work.
Over the whole fall, the Nasdaq-100 dropped 31.8%, so Meta's own problems account for most of the 76.7%. Say you had put $1,000 into the stock at the September 2021 record close. At the November 2022 low it would have been worth $232.64, and calendar 2022 alone cost the share 64.2% (source: Yahoo Finance META history).
Crypto holders will recognize the size of that fall. Bitcoin's close dropped 76.6% from its high on November 8, 2021 to its low on November 21, 2022 (source: Yahoo Finance BTC-USD history), which is nearly the same depth in almost the same months. From day to day, though, the two prices are only loosely linked, as the correlation between Meta stock and bitcoin shows.
How Meta stock recovered in 2023 and 2024
Meta stock recovered from its November 2022 low in a climb that nearly tripled the share price in 2023. It rose 194.1% over that calendar year and first closed above its 2021 record on January 19, 2024, at $383.45, 442 days after the low (source: Yahoo Finance META history).
Early in the climb Meta pushed to cut costs, and in its fourth-quarter report on February 1, 2023, Zuckerberg named 2023 the company's "Year of Efficiency". It cut the expense forecast, lowered planned capital spending and added $40 billion to its buyback plan (source: Meta fourth-quarter 2022 results). The shares rose 23.3% on the next trading day.
A year later Meta started paying a dividend. Its fourth-quarter 2023 report on February 1, 2024 declared a first quarterly payment of $0.50 a share, added $50 billion for buybacks and showed revenue up 25% (source: Meta fourth-quarter 2023 results). The shares jumped 20.3% the following day, and Meta's dividend payments have continued every quarter since.
The recovery took 864 days from the 2021 record to the next record close, which is the real cost of a deep fall. A holder who bought at the top waited more than two years and four months just to break even, before dividends.
Meta's all-time high and the fall to the 2026 low
Meta's all-time high is an intraday price of $796.25, reached on August 15, 2025, and its highest close is $790.00 on August 12, 2025. From that record close the share fell 33.5% to $525.72 on March 27, 2026. Its 2026 intraday low of $520.26 came the same day, 34.7% below the intraday record.
The record followed Meta's second-quarter 2025 report on July 30, 2025, after which the shares rose 11.3% the next day. Within two weeks they reached the record close, almost nine times the November 2022 low.
The fall began after the next report, with an 11.3% drop on October 30, 2025, the day after Meta's third-quarter 2025 results. A 10.4% jump after the following report, on January 29, 2026, interrupted the slide, which then sped up in late March 2026, when two juries found Meta liable for harm to young users in the same week. On March 26 the shares fell nearly 8%, removing some $120 billion of market value, as investors asked whether social media faced a "Big Tobacco Moment" (source: Investopedia via Yahoo Finance).
The 2026 low came the next day. Over the whole fall from the record the Nasdaq-100 slipped just 3.0%, so this cycle was almost entirely Meta's own, built on report-day falls and courtroom losses in Meta's lawsuits.
BloFin's METAUSDT Perpetual went live at 3PM UTC (11AM ET) on March 26, 2026, in the middle of that 8% fall and one session before the low, and the contract tracks the price of Meta's US-listed shares (source: BloFin listing notice). Its whole trading history therefore runs from the last day of that fall through the rebound and the October pullback. You can follow it on the METAUSDT Perpetual page, and the token on the METAX/USDT Spot page.
Meta's 2026 rebound and its third-quarter report
Meta's 2026 rebound took the share 47.9% above its March low by September 24, 2026, when it closed at $777.59, its highest close of 2026. By October 22, the day after its third-quarter report, it had slipped 16.6% to $648.85, which leaves it 17.9% below the record close (source: Yahoo Finance META history).
The climb was uneven, with two more report-day falls on the way up. The share fell 8.6% on April 30 and 8.0% on July 30, when it closed at $539.03, just 2.5% above the March low close. September then brought a 26.7% gain, in the same month Meta released Muse, its AI agent (source: Yahoo Finance META history). At its September 24 high of $779.82 the share came within 2.1% of the $796.25 record.
Meta's third-quarter results came out after the closing bell on October 21, 2026. Revenue rose 26% to $64.6 billion, while costs rose 68%, including a $9.9 billion charge for its agreement with 52 state attorneys general to settle lawsuits over teen mental health (source: Meta third-quarter 2026 results). Capital spending of $34.9 billion was larger than the cash the business brought in, so free cash flow came to negative $2.1 billion (source: Meta third-quarter 2026 results). The next day the share fell 7.0%, from $697.52 to $648.85, while the Nasdaq-100 fell 2.9% (source: Yahoo Finance QQQ history).
From the October 22 close, the share would need to rise 21.8% to match its record close, and it sits 18.5% below the $796.25 intraday record (source: Yahoo Finance META history). Each of the five results reports from October 2025 to October 2026 moved the share by between 7.0% and 11.3% the next day, four of them down and one up. Trading Meta around earnings explains what moves of that size mean for a position.
How to read Meta's long-term price chart
To read Meta's long-term price chart, compare moves in percentages, use the adjusted close when you include dividends, and check the Nasdaq-100 over the same dates. A $100 fall meant 46.0% of the share price at the July 2018 record, but only 12.7% at the August 2025 record.
A fall's size is the drop divided by the starting price, and the climb needed to recover is the starting price divided by the low, minus one.
Fall | From and to | Size of the fall | Climb needed to get back |
|---|---|---|---|
2012 | $38.00 to $17.73 | 53.3% | 114.3% |
2018 | $217.50 to $124.06 | 43.0% | 75.3% |
2021 to 2022 | $382.18 to $88.91 | 76.7% | 329.9% |
2025 to 2026 | $790.00 to $525.72 | 33.5% | 50.3% |
That arithmetic is why the 2022 recovery took so long. Each fall needs a bigger climb to undo than its own size, and the gap grows quickly once a fall passes a third. A chart drawn on a log scale shows equal percentage moves at equal heights, so the 2012 and 2022 falls look as large as they felt. An ordinary scale makes every early move look tiny.
Price history sites also show two closing columns. The plain close is the price that traded, while the adjusted close folds in the dividends Meta has paid since 2024, so it runs a little lower for older dates. For how far the price swings from day to day, read Meta stock volatility. If you plan to hold for years, you can own those cycles through a fund or as tokenized Meta, and the costs of each are compared in Meta ETF versus tokenized Meta.
Looking to trade Meta's next cycle? To get started, you'll need to first create a BloFin account, fund your account with cryptocurrency, and go to the METAX/USDT Spot trading page or the METAUSDT Perpetual trading page.
Frequently asked questions
How much was Meta stock 3 years ago?
Meta stock closed at $314.01 on October 23, 2023. Its close of $648.85 on October 22, 2026, almost exactly three years later, is a price gain of 106.6%. Counting the dividends paid since March 2024, which the adjusted close includes, the gain is about 108.6% (source: Yahoo Finance META history).
What was Meta stock's best day ever?
Meta's best day was July 25, 2013, when the share rose 29.6% from $26.51 to $34.36 after a report showing mobile had grown to about 41% of its ad revenue (source: Facebook second-quarter 2013 results). The next two biggest gains, 23.3% on February 2, 2023 and 20.3% on February 2, 2024, also came the day after a results report.
When did Facebook stock change its ticker to META?
The ticker followed the company's new name, which Facebook adopted in October 2021. The Class A shares kept trading as FB for seven more months, then switched to META on June 9, 2022, with no action needed from anyone who held them (source: Meta Investor Relations ticker notice).
How did Meta stock do in its first year as a public company?
Meta's first year was a loss for anyone who bought at the listing. The share closed at $26.25 on May 17, 2013, one year after the $38 listing price was set, a fall of 30.9% (source: Yahoo Finance META history). It took until August 2, 2013 to close above $38 again, nine days after Facebook's second-quarter 2013 report on July 24 (source: Facebook second-quarter 2013 results).
Why is Meta's adjusted close lower than its closing price?
The adjusted close lowers each older price by the dividends paid after it, so a past close and a later one compare as total returns. Yahoo Finance's dividend record lists 11 quarterly Meta dividends since February 2024, worth $5.675 a share in all (source: Yahoo Finance META history). That makes the first-day close of $38.23 show as $37.87 on an adjusted basis, a small gap that grows with every payment.
Is Meta stock a buy now?
Whether Meta is a buy depends on what you expect from its spending and its court cases, and its history cuts both ways. Every fall of a third or more since 2012 was followed by a new record close except the one that began in August 2025, but the recoveries took from about two months to more than two years. In the September 2026 quarter, revenue grew 26% while capital spending ran ahead of the cash its operations brought in (source: Meta third-quarter 2026 results). Is Meta stock a good investment? sets out how to weigh both sides yourself, and none of this is advice to buy or sell.
Researched and written by the BloFin Academy editorial team with AI-assisted drafting. All facts independently verified. Primary sources include Yahoo Finance daily price history for Meta, the Invesco QQQ Trust and bitcoin, Meta Investor Relations releases on the 2012 offering, results from 2012 to 2023, the 2022 ticker change and the third-quarter 2026 results, and the SEC, with reporting from CBS News, the Associated Press, The Guardian, NPR and Investopedia, and BloFin's METAUSDT listing notice, current as of October 25, 2026.
Nothing in this article constitutes financial advice, and nothing in it is a recommendation to buy, sell or hold Meta in any form. Meta's share price has fallen by a third or more six times since 2012, once by 76.7%, and each of the five recoveries so far took months or years, with no promise that another will come. A holder of METAX carries the same falls, and a leveraged METAUSDT Perpetual position can be liquidated during a single report-day drop of the size Meta has seen several times. Past performance does not indicate future results. Do your own research and consider your risk tolerance before you trade on BloFin.