Want A 34% Discount on Meta Stock? Why Not Get Paid While You Wait for It?

Get paid a healthy income stream today for simply agreeing to buy shares of Meta Platforms at a steep discount, but only if the stock takes a serious tumble.

After a strong run-up, Meta Platforms (META) shares have spent the last year going nowhere, currently trading around $661 and lagging the broader market. For investors eyeing the social media giant, that sideways churn creates an opportunity to do something more interesting than just waiting for a better price. You can get paid, right now, for agreeing to buy the stock at a significant discount to today’s price, but only if it ever drops that far.

11% annualized yield at a 30% margin of safety, by selling put options.

• Sell a put option on META expiring 6/17/2027, with a strike price of $460.
• Collect roughly $2,503 in premium per contract (each contract covers 100 shares).
• That works out to about 5.9% annualized on the $46,000 of cash you set aside to secure the trade.
• Park that cash in a money market or savings account earning roughly 5.0%, and your total yield climbs to about 10.9%.
• And if META falls below $460, you buy it at $460, an effective entry near $434.98 a share after the premium, about a 34% discount to today’s $661.04.

Win Or Wait, You Still Pocket The Premium

If META stays above $460 through 6/17/2027, the put expires worthless and you simply keep the full $2,503 premium. That is about 5.4% on the $46,000 you set aside over 338 days, cash that might otherwise earn you 5.0% or so. You never buy the stock and keep the income, free to do it again.

If META closes below $460, you are assigned and buy 100 shares at $460. The $2,503 premium you already pocketed lowers your effective cost to about $434.98 a share, roughly a 34% discount to today’s price, though if the stock has fallen further by then you would be holding a paper loss.

So what happens if META really does close below $460, and you are the one buying? Then everything rests on a single question.

Would You Want To Own META On Sale?

The real question, then, is whether you would be comfortable owning the shares if you get them. You would be buying into a business defined by a powerful tension. On one hand, the existing advertising empire is a juggernaut. In the first quarter, total revenue shot up 33% to $56.3 billion, driven by a 19% increase in ad impressions and a 12% rise in the average price per ad. This isn’t just a strong economy at work; the company is making its own luck, pointing to AI-driven enhancements that drove a “more than 6% increase in conversion rate for landing page view ads.”

On the other hand, that hugely profitable core business is funding one of the most ambitious and costly corporate transformations ever attempted. Meta is spending at a breathtaking pace to build a world-class AI operation, recently boosting its 2026 capital expenditure forecast to a range of $125 billion to $145 billion. The scale of the bet is immense, reflected in a recent “$107 billion step-up in our contractual commitments” for cloud and infrastructure deals. The risk for an investor is that the path to making money from these new AI products is still largely theoretical. Management has even acknowledged it has “continued to underestimate our compute needs” and doesn’t have a “very precise plan” for how each new product will scale.

This is the bargain at the heart of the stock. You get the dominant, cash-gushing social media and advertising platforms of today, which are themselves getting smarter and more efficient. But you are also funding a colossal, open-ended venture into artificial intelligence. The company is betting it can build the future of personal and business agents, and you can read more about what could power the next rally in META stock. The payoff could be enormous, but the timeline and ultimate return on that investment remain the biggest questions hanging over the company.

That uncertainty is exactly what makes this trade strong for the right investor. You collect an immediate income payment that you keep no matter what. If the stock holds up, the cash is yours, free and clear. If the AI spending spooks the market and the shares fall hard, you become an owner at a price you chose beforehand, well below today’s level. The key thing to watch is the product pipeline. Management has suggested monetization could eventually come from “commission structures or a premium offering” on its new AI agents. Any concrete progress in turning that massive capital spend into actual, revenue-generating products would be the first sign that the company’s historic bet is starting to pay off.

Wondering whether another stock offers a better yield, or what this same trade would pay on a name you already like? You can screen the latest cash-secured put yields across the market for yourself. And if it is exposure to communication services as a whole you want rather than this one name, a communication services ETF like XLC covers that single sector. Going broader than any one sector, to a quality-first mix across the whole market, is where the portfolio below comes in.

Before You Commit To Buying More Of One Stock, Know How Much You Already Carry

A put sale is a promise to add to a single name, and the first thing a professional checks before that promise is existing exposure, because concentration is what turns an income trade into an oversized bet. That check is exactly what the Trefis Wealth team provides, with the same rules-based systematic discipline that runs our High Quality Portfolio. Request a free vulnerability audit of your biggest positions.