There is a lot of conviction going into Facebook’s earnings and while the company shouldn’t have any trouble with delivering a top line beat, the extent to which Facebook tops expectations has narrowed in the past couple years as management is far more specific on its guidance range than in the past. Nonetheless even if the company were to sustain growth in-line with the analyst consensus range, the stock will most likely pivot higher. Source: Freestockcharts The company’s fundamentals remain sound despite broad fears over market volatility. Of course, I’d like to assume that I’m not pounding the table on this company prior to a major recession, but after doing further due diligence on the topic of recession probabilities and referring to other analyst reports that are fairly comprehensive, I come away with the impression that the usual fear mongering among analysts is more a symptom of market sentiment souring as opposed to legitimate forward looking economic research. Sure, high-beta names perform worse in broader market corrections, so if you can’t stomach volatility I’d suggest other names outside of technology like Kimberly Clark, AT&T or Macerich. The commercial REITs, consumer products and telecoms are a safe port of refuge. I received a research report on Sunday from Michael Pachter over at Wedbush Securities. He maintained his outperform rating and $115 price target:We expect above consensus Q4 revenue driven by mobile and e-commerce trends over the holiday period. Our estimates are for revenue of $5.37 billion and EPS of $0.68, versus consensus of $5.36 billion and $0.68. Facebook does not provide detailed top- or bottom-line guidance for individual quarters or the year. Our expectation for mobile ad ARPU growth of 16% q-o-q may be conservative due to a few factors. According to the Yahoo Developer Network, the number of minutes per day spent by U.S. consumers in messaging and social apps increased by roughly 50% y-o-y in Q2:15, a trend that we believe continued through year-end. Q4 was also the first full quarter of auto-play video, carousel ads, dynamic product ads, and click-to-play video ads in the Facebook Audience Network, likely boosting eCPMs. I agree with Michael in that there’s potential upside to top line revenue. But even without factoring aggressive growth assumptions there’s still meaningful upside to the stock. Nonetheless, the healthy audience metrics going into earnings provides some foresight on the extent to which Facebook could potentially surprise. Facebook remains a buy going into earnings.