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Google shares hit $1,000 after strong earnings

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Google shares hit $1,000 after strong earnings

#181

Post by tanzam75 »

pslam wrote: post #170
Frozenlock wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. I wanted to buy 'in-the-money' options not so long ago. When I did the math, I just decided to let it go and check for a cheaper stock.

Especially if you wanted to do a simple covered-call, e.g: * Buy 100 GOOG at $1000. * Sell 1 Nov 16 $1050 Call. (Edit: Then assuming GOOG doesn't go down significantly it's a profit even if assigned) Normally that would be a relatively low risk position, but you'd need $100,000 in GOOG underlying to cover it, which is a rather large amount for small investors to throw around even with margin accounts. And that's just…

> Oh, and if you thought $1000 is annoying to trade, check out Berkshire Hathaway:

If you want to trade Berkshire Hathaway, you're supposed to trade the B shares -- not the A shares.

Berkshire A usually trades under a thousand shares per day. Even on a market-value basis, this is still much lower than the B shares.

Re: Google shares hit $1,000 after strong earnings

#182

Post by dminor »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #137
md224 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 'Ranking' on Google is very much a pay to play kind of thing these days with their page layout Could you expand on this? Are you referring to how AdWords content is visually privileged over organic search results?

I think Danny Sullivan over at Searchengineland has done a better job of chronicling the changes but to give you a flavor, the size of the ad space before the first organic has grown tremendously, the injection of Google properties (G+, Youtube, etc) has further pushed on search results. When a buying intent is detected the 'shopping' bar activates which only shows shopping results from people who advertise on Google…

> I think it was a smart move on their part from the shareholder perspective (disclosure I sold all my Google stock at $650 :-(). The second order effects though will be interesting. You see if Google becomes just a catalog, sort of like SkyMall "Magazine" in airplane seats, then it risks losing all of its unique utility.

I think the main thing is whether Google can monetize the relevant results, without letting in the irrelevant ones.

I work for an online retailer, and we pretty much show up in all the places we always have, except that now we are paying for more of those spots. Some of our organic search results have fallen off a bit as Google emphasizes larger brand names, but I imagine they'll pick up via their Trusted Stores initiative or whatever the next monetization scheme is.

Re: Google shares hit $1,000 after strong earnings

#183

Post by qdog »

tanzam75 wrote: post #168
qdog wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shareholders don't have voting rights, how can they pressure Google to do anything? I don't know if they should be paying a dividend at the moment, but their stock conveys no power to the stockholder. It's like paying taxes without getting to vote. Their stock price might go up for the next decade for all I know, and it's not like they don't make money or something. I just don't want to invest my money without gettin…

> Shareholders don't have voting rights, how can they pressure Google to do anything? Shareholders do have voting rights at present. The problem is that Google Class B shares carry 10x the voting rights of Class A shares. Thus, even an overwhelming majority of market cap would still be unable to outvote the insiders. Google is in the process of introducing a nonvoting C share class. This innovation was passed despite…

Right, my mistake. Not sure why I was thinking they didn't get to vote at all right now, but still, yes owning a share of Class A doesn't entitle you to very much right now.

Re: Google shares hit $1,000 after strong earnings

#184

Post by fersho311 »

junto wrote: post #178
fersho311 wrote: post #147

Fun fact: If you had bought a call yesterday for $300, it would now be worth $3100. 1000% return on investment. Yesterday I bought a chipotle call (because of earnings release) for $600 and now its worth $3600 Now that the political budget debate is over, I think we will see a spectacularly volatile movement upwards and strong earnings will push stocks to absurd prices way over any reason. The best thing to do is to…

Newbie here. How and where can you 'buy these calls'?

Any trading platform will let you buy calls and puts. They are called options. Here's a few examples: scottrade, ameritrade, etrade. I personally use ameritrade.

Re: Google shares hit $1,000 after strong earnings

#185

Post by makomk »

fear91 wrote: post #23
hugofirth wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anti-competitive lobbies, hugely funded by Google's competitors, have tried to make that stick in the US and EU. They have largely failed to do so both times. Prove it :)

I guess since Google got a court verdict stating that their search results are their "opinion" and thus "free speech", they cannot be really attacked from this point. Add to that the fact that their algorithm is top-secret and probably heavily compartmentalized and it becomes even harder. I am not arguing whether Google breaks a law or not, I simply say that they hurt the smaller players. Getting rankings is getting…

Some of the smaller players who've been complaining to the EU really, really needed to be hurt. They were spamming up the search results with their crappy "vertical search" pages which couldn't actually find anything - they just relied on SEO to get them ranked above actual search results and then hoped people would get desperate enough to click them.

Re: Google shares hit $1,000 after strong earnings

#186

Post by azakai »

sytelus wrote: post #179
ChuckMcM wrote: post #103

Google historically left a lot of money on the table (not using every spot on the page for ads, giving away services with real value, etc.) They decided to stop doing that when they decided they were a 'peer' of Apple's. The shareholders love it because it means Google will finally be pulling in as much cash as they 'can' vs as much as they needed. Users seem to be somewhat divided on the issue. Sophisticated users a…

On my 26" display I have almost never seen ads taking up all the space. In fact most of the time, there is one or two ads at the top and rest 80% of the space if organic search results. People cherry pick examples to show how bad ads are but in general it's not true. So, no, ranking is still critical, well and alive with good algorithms. Current revenue increase is because of YouTube's contribution that's finally hap…

> On my 26" display I have almost never seen ads taking up all the space

It depends what you search for. If you search for something Google can monetize, like this search for sofas

http://i.imgur.com/KAZ6zuq.jpg

then little room is left for "normal" results. But if you search for something non-monetizable, of course less ads will show up.

Re: Google shares hit $1,000 after strong earnings

#187

Post by thetrb »

rprospero wrote: post #175
ChuckMcM wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Danny Sullivan over at Searchengineland has done a better job of chronicling the changes but to give you a flavor, the size of the ad space before the first organic has grown tremendously, the injection of Google properties (G+, Youtube, etc) has further pushed on search results. When a buying intent is detected the 'shopping' bar activates which only shows shopping results from people who advertise on Google…

I performed your experiment and it didn't seem to match your conclusions. My search was: jwt web toolkit The search page itself had no Google ads on it. The top link was the homepage for the toolkit project. There were no ad links on the page. The second and third links were for wikipedia, which contained no Google ads. The fourth link did have Google ads on it. The fifth and sixth lengths did not. The seventh link d…

"jwt web toolkit" and "neutron spin echo" are your best examples of results that might contain ads?

How about "playstation 4" for example?

Re: Google shares hit $1,000 after strong earnings

#188

Post by ProAm »

raldi wrote: post #24
JonSkeptic wrote: post #3

I think this is interesting because it matches my user experience with Google products in a very inverted way. Google search has gotten worse and worse lately, forcing me on to other search engines with worse UIs just so that I can get useful results. Youtube UI gets worse every time they update it. They cancelled the RSS reader. The email UI keeps getting worse and featuring more ads. But the stock value hit $1000.…

> Google search has gotten worse and worse lately, forcing me on to other search engines with worse UIs just so that I can get useful results Can you give a few example queries?

These days I find Google is good for finding things you already know but don't remember. e.g. Number to my favorite Thai restaurant. But has become worse for finding things you don't know. I encounter this a lot when Im trying to find information related to my work but am not knowledgeable enough to narrow my keywords. Mainly programming or server related info....

Re: Google shares hit $1,000 after strong earnings

#189

Post by grey-area »

oh_sigh wrote: post #169
grey-area wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both Google and Apple have reached this stage at around the same time in my opinion - both are now milking existing users rather than looking for innovative new markets or products. Once companies grow to a certain size it seems almost inevitable.

Yeah, self driving cars, google glass, and loon are not innovative new markets at all.

I'll be interested to see how wholeheartedly they pursue those ventures, and how many turn into real markets, but yes there are definitely potential counter-examples, I'm sure you could think of some for Apple too, like the now seemingly inevitable smart watch. I don't expect something with the impact of the ipod/iphone/google search from either of them now though, and glass to me is completely underwhelming because I have no interest in walking around with a camera on my person linked to google. Ubiquitous networked computing is coming though, and you could say that's a forerunner of it even if it doesn't pan out.

However Google's search and advertising business (which funds all the rest) has definitely been more focussed on revenue for a while, and Apple has that same feel to me (as a customer and developer) of a company which has peaked and been taken over by those more interested in generating cash than ideas.

Completely understand why you might not agree though.

Re: Google shares hit $1,000 after strong earnings

#190

Post by grey-area »

azakai wrote: post #186
sytelus wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On my 26" display I have almost never seen ads taking up all the space. In fact most of the time, there is one or two ads at the top and rest 80% of the space if organic search results. People cherry pick examples to show how bad ads are but in general it's not true. So, no, ranking is still critical, well and alive with good algorithms. Current revenue increase is because of YouTube's contribution that's finally hap…

> On my 26" display I have almost never seen ads taking up all the space It depends what you search for. If you search for something Google can monetize, like this search for sofas http://i.imgur.com/KAZ6zuq.jpg then little room is left for "normal" results. But if you search for something non-monetizable, of course less ads will show up.

Is there just one normal result there on that entire screen? Ouch.
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