Meta Platforms Stock News: META approaches $300 as its releases Twitter-competitor Threads

Meta Platforms (META) stock is advancing toward $300 in Thursday’s premarket after the owner of Facebook released a new social media platform to compete with Elon Musk’s Twitter.

META stock has gained 1.6% early Thursday to trade at $299.

Meta Platforms stock news: 10 million sign up to Threads

Founder Mark Zuckerberg’s Instagram unit built and released the new Threads platform late Wednesday. The company released versions for iOS in the Apple Store and an Android version in the Google Play Store. Instagram says that 10 million people already signed up for Threads in the first seven hours it was made available to the public.

Unlike Instagram’s photography-first layout, Threads is more akin to Twitter with its focus on text-based posting or “microblogging”. Some critics have already called the new platform a copycat version of Twitter.

For his part, Elon Musk did not hold back from bashing the creator of Threads: 

One major drawback for Threads appears to be that users must already have an account with Instagram in order to sign up.

Musk and Zuckerberg are supposedly going to duke it out in public combat later this year. In a Twitter thread discussing Zuckerberg’s intention to release a rival microblogging site in June, Musk suggested that he and the Meta Platforms CEO hold a “cage match”. Las Vegas has been suggested as a venue, but no official date has been announced yet.

Although an aggressive tweeter, Musk is not known for his fighting capabilities, while Zuckerberg medalled at a Brazilian jiu-jitsu competition earlier this year.

Meta Platforms stock forecast: $300 is a given, but what about $400?

META stock is already up 136% year to date after the stock collapsed in 2022, and the stock has performed much better than that since the $88 bottom late last year.

Meta stock has now reached a level with major psychological implications. The $300 level – besides being a big, round number – also served as resistance during the second half of 2020 three years ago. Particularly, this region was difficult to defeat in both August and November of 2020. This time, however, META stock is deep into the overbought region on the weekly Relative Strength Index (RSI). A pullback seems extremely necessary, and the $250 to $260 region has a history of realizing support.

If Threads does prove popular enough to provide a boost to the stock, then expect META to move slowly through the $300 to $350 region. This area saw an enormous amount of volume in late 2021 and would appear to be a likely spot for profit-taking. Based on that viewpoint, $400 in META’s future seems unlikely for the rest of this year.

META weekly chart