CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who was the driver behind the rebrand and the focus on the metaverse, seems to have gotten the last laugh as Meta stock has soared since then, crossing the $1 trillion threshold. However, despite the proliferation of Meta’s AI tools, the losses from Reality Labs are only growing, and the company expects them to continue to https://www.xcritical.com/ grow in 2025 as well. He declares that as of right now, investors are “quite limited, at least in the public realm,” in ways to play the blockchain-enabled aspect of the metaverse. Risk-averse investors should steer clear of Tencent Holdings because it’s headquartered in China. The Chinese government has been cracking down on tech companies, making their regulatory risk high. The question between centralization and decentralization highlights once again how early we are in the metaverse trend.

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Meta’s growing money pit is notable because a key rival has essentially thrown in the towel on its own version of Reality Labs. Zuckerberg has called out Apple (AAPL -0.75%) as its primary rival in its attempt to own the next computing platform, as Zuckerberg said a couple of years ago. Meta will report fourth-quarter and full-year financial results February 1. Analysts expect Meta to report its most profitable year ever with a record $72.6 billion of projected EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization), according to FactSet. This ETF only began trading on June fount metaverse etf 30, 2021, so it’s too soon to make any judgments about its performance. This performance lags that of the broader market, as the S&P 500 index has returned 9.5% and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite has gained 4.7% over this period.

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By contrast, Arweave incentivizes miners to store data forever by gradually paying over time from an endowment pool that users pay into. This long-term solution to the problem could make Arweave a winner here. There’s still a long way to go with the metaverse trend, and it could take various paths.

Meta: Analyst says ‘now is the time to buy’

• Meta investors who trust Mark Zuckerberg have been rewarded as the stock outperformed the market significantly over the past year.
• For a while, it seemed like both companies thought that was the metaverse, but that vision seems nearly dead, given the weakness at Reality Labs and the ascendance of generative AI.
• Zuckerberg, who owns about 13% of the company, grew much richer as Meta stock soared.
• Meta will report fourth-quarter and full-year financial results February 1.

But, as previously noted, the metaverse will have other needs, and Cloudflare can address some of these as well. For example, the company already offers cybersecurity solutions, blocking 136 billion daily threats. And, in 2021, it launched a data storage product that may help to meet the metaverse’s outsized data storage needs. Meta Platforms (META) shares move into negative territory on Thursday as investors weigh artificial intelligence (AI) spending concerns with the company’s third quarter earnings beat. Meta’s Q earnings beat EPS and revenue estimates, yet shares dropped ~3% in after-hours trading. Driven by AI advancements and better ad performance, Meta reported 20% revenue growth in constant…

The stock was trading down 3% after hours, even as the social media giant edged past estimates on the top and bottom lines. The Facebook parent had already soared this year, so expectations were high coming into the report. However, with the stock price arguably getting stretched and growth in the advertising business slowing, investor attention turned to the company’s spending in its Reality Labs division, and they didn’t like what they saw.

The Motley Fool reaches millions of people every month through our premium investing solutions, free guidance and market analysis on Fool.com, top-rated podcasts, and non-profit The Motley Fool Foundation. AllianceBernstein’s Tierney also notes their cloud business Azure should benefit over time if the metaverse takes off. Meanwhile Matterport (MTTR, $13), a spatial data company that renders 3D versions of real-life buildings, could be another play on the metaverse. Those trends could also bode well for Lam Research (LRCX, $679), an equipment supplier that makes gear companies use to produce semiconductors. That is, the computer gaming and tech giant provides the tools other companies need to create their own metaverses. Most notable among these tools is its recently launched Omniverse platform.

“That’s a boost for companies with cloud and data center exposure.” Stocks that fit that bill, Colello says, include AMD (AMD, $132) and Arista Networks (ANET, $127). Last week, Meta Platforms took its first leap into the metaverse via its public launch of Horizon Worlds to adults in the U.S. and Canada. Horizon Worlds is a free social VR platform in which users equipped with the company’s Oculus Quest 2 VR headsets can interact. Content delivery network (CDN) Cloudflare (NET -0.67%) is designed with speed in mind. The company claims its network can deliver content in 50 milliseconds or less to 95% of the world’s population.

One question is whether the bulk of the metaverse will be built by corporate entities or with decentralized solutions such as blockchains and cryptocurrencies. But, since the future is uncertain, it’s worth keeping at least a couple of cryptocurrencies on your radar as well because the technology could prove useful in the metaverse’s development. Of the five stocks listed here, Cloudflare is the only one the ProShares Metaverse ETF doesn’t hold shares of. But its expense ratio (fee) is a smidge lower, which might make it more attractive to some investors.

Leading AI company OpenAI partnered with Microsoft because its cloud-computing product Azure provides the necessary power and storage to scale AI applications to a massive audience. Therefore, its AI trailblazing and its powerful cloud-computing product could make Microsoft a metaverse beneficiary. Patience is key here, because the metaverse could take a decade or more to develop. The metaverse is still in its early stages, so it’s not too late to invest in metaverse stocks. Let’s look at ways to invest in this exciting space and some of the companies that are positioned to profit from the trend. Meta Platforms (META -0.87%) stock pulled back after its earnings report Wednesday night.

Let’s take a look at the Roundhill Ball Metaverse ETF (METV -0.63%), the world’s first metaverse exchange-traded fund (ETF). You might decide that one or more of this ETF’s holdings are worth further exploration or that you want to buy the ETF itself. Learn how you can make money from the wave of seasoned companies innovating in AI and new AI tech companies.

Scaling back on the metaverse, as Apple has done with the Vision Pro, would certainly save Meta Platforms money, though it’s unclear how much. The setback for the Vision Pro seems to be a warning sign for Meta’s own metaverse ambitions, even though Meta’s Quest devices are at a much lower price point than the Vision Pro. This article is part of Fortune’s quarterly investment guide for Q1 2022. Meta, which also broke its prior high closing share price of $382, capped a significant comeback from the stock’s 77% collapse from its 2021 peak to its November 2022 nadir. Below is a brief look at how the top five companies in this ETF are involved in the metaverse.

Two of its products — Unity Personal and Unity Student — are offered free to content creators who are just starting out. As these creators succeed, it’s likely they will become paying Unity customers. Investors don’t think of Microsoft (MSFT -0.77%) as a metaverse stock but its artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities could prove invaluable to its development. Both Meta and Roblox have said that user-generated content is needed to help bring the metaverse to life. And generative AI applications are swiftly simplifying content creation for everyone.

For this reason, it’s important for investors to stay engaged and curious when looking for ways to invest. New developments will reveal more opportunities over the long haul. Being a content delivery network, Theta is conceptually similar to Cloudflare. However, it could theoretically deliver metaverse content faster because it’s physically stored closer to the consumer. The project started as a way to livestream VR video games and has quickly captured the attention of Alphabet (GOOG -1.35%)(GOOGL -1.42%) and Samsung.

Of course, Arweave isn’t the only decentralized project thinking about data storage. But its endowment pool payouts encourage long-term data storage, and that’s a clear differentiator here. In many other cases, users pay crypto miners up-front fees to store data for a limited period of time.