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Alphabet Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2021 Results

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Re: Alphabet Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2021 Results

#101

Post by paulpauper »

This is the closest thing to investing in Renaissance Technologies. It's too bad there is not a way to get 2-3x leverage version of google. The CAGR since its IPO in 2004 is the same as Renaissance too. Rather than executing millions of trades, the profit is from millions of clicks. Like renaissance , massive statistical analysis is involved, such as tracking click patterns and optimizing the ads.

There is no limit to how high this will go. More and more economic activity is being funneled into these dozen or so mega-tech companies, which is how they are able to grow annual revenues at 20-40%/year despite 3% GDP growth.

Re: Alphabet Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2021 Results

#102

Post by paulpauper »

joanfihu wrote: post #59

I’m wondering if growth is just synthetic at this point. They can just add more ads regardless of user growth. There has been a noticeable increase in ads across all their products.

They don't even need growth. Their earnings and profit margins are high enough that they can deliver billions of dollars of value every quarter to shareholders absent of growth.

Re: Alphabet Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2021 Results

#103

Post by paulpauper »

purple_ferret wrote: post #4

Really amazing how much money they keep squeezing out search But it's basically impossible to escape the ads on it these days, so it's not surprising.

Not just search. it is the entire internet, save for Facebook's properties and few others. huge.

Re: Alphabet Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2021 Results

#104

Post by timbeccue »

paulpauper wrote: post #101

This is the closest thing to investing in Renaissance Technologies. It's too bad there is not a way to get 2-3x leverage version of google. The CAGR since its IPO in 2004 is the same as Renaissance too. Rather than executing millions of trades, the profit is from millions of clicks. Like renaissance , massive statistical analysis is involved, such as tracking click patterns and optimizing the ads. There is no limit t…

Margin or options would give you leveraged exposure.

Re: Alphabet Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2021 Results

#105

Post by kccqzy »

panarky wrote: post #56
carlsborg wrote: post #24

Summary: Full year 2021 revenue $257B, 41% year on year growth. Net income $76B, up from $40B yoy. Quarterly: Q4 of 2021 they made $75B revenue, most of it came from Google Search, $43B up from $31.9B in Q4 2020. Youtube $8.6B of ads, Google Network $9.3B from ads. Google cloud did $5B revenue for the quarter, up from $3.8B in Q4 2020. It lost $890m this quarter compared to $1.2B Q4 2020. "Other Services" did $8.1B r…

It's one thing for a midsize company to grow revenue 41% but for a massive global corporation with 156,000 employees to do it is nothing short of astounding . And this giant, mature company isn't sacrificing margins for top-line growth, they're actually increasing margins at the same time. Truly breathtaking.

It's like they have a knob that they can turn: turning it to the left means fewer ads and a better user experience, and turning it to the right means more ads and more revenue.

My own experience from Search and YouTube is that they have massively turned the knob to the right. I don't know why they are chasing revenue growth with such craze. It makes me worried that the leadership don't know what's Alphabet's next big thing so they are just milking the cow while they can.

Re: Alphabet Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2021 Results

#107

Post by skybrian »

paulpauper wrote: post #101

This is the closest thing to investing in Renaissance Technologies. It's too bad there is not a way to get 2-3x leverage version of google. The CAGR since its IPO in 2004 is the same as Renaissance too. Rather than executing millions of trades, the profit is from millions of clicks. Like renaissance , massive statistical analysis is involved, such as tracking click patterns and optimizing the ads. There is no limit t…

It seems like there should be a limit to the ad market, though? Also, isn't increasing ad blindness a thing? (Even without ad blockers.)

Re: Alphabet Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2021 Results

#108

Post by skybrian »

yazaddaruvala wrote: post #87
deltree7 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that simple. Every rack that is sitting there is an opportunity cost for another efficient or more profitable rack. So, there has to be smart calculation to make the keep/upgrade decision

Disclaimer: Previously worked at Amazon but not AWS. You would typically be right. However, the saying as of 2013 was "At any given second there is always at-least one new computer being plugged in, to support S3's growth." > Every rack that is sitting there is an opportunity cost for another efficient or more profitable rack. If AWS wasn't already supply side constrained on new hardware to fill new AWS data centers,…

Any large user of datacenters could have a shortage of datacenter space if they didn't plan ahead enough. It might take two years to build a new data center? Space crunches have happened before.

But maybe the chip crunch is a current bottleneck, or results in higher prices for new hardware? If so, there's a reason to delay upgrades and run older hardware a bit longer.

This is just guesswork. Supply crunches aren't predictable from first principles.

Re: Alphabet Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2021 Results

#109

Post by ehsankia »

kccqzy wrote: post #105
panarky wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's one thing for a midsize company to grow revenue 41% but for a massive global corporation with 156,000 employees to do it is nothing short of astounding . And this giant, mature company isn't sacrificing margins for top-line growth, they're actually increasing margins at the same time. Truly breathtaking.

It's like they have a knob that they can turn: turning it to the left means fewer ads and a better user experience, and turning it to the right means more ads and more revenue. My own experience from Search and YouTube is that they have massively turned the knob to the right. I don't know why they are chasing revenue growth with such craze. It makes me worried that the leadership don't know what's Alphabet's next big…

I just don't see how 40% YoY growth is sustainable. Before they were doing ~25% which was already insane, but 40% will now be "expected" and anything less will be considered a failure probably. There's a limit to how much they can crank that knob...

Re: Alphabet Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2021 Results

#110

Post by paulpauper »

timbeccue wrote: post #104
paulpauper wrote: post #101

This is the closest thing to investing in Renaissance Technologies. It's too bad there is not a way to get 2-3x leverage version of google. The CAGR since its IPO in 2004 is the same as Renaissance too. Rather than executing millions of trades, the profit is from millions of clicks. Like renaissance , massive statistical analysis is involved, such as tracking click patterns and optimizing the ads. There is no limit t…

Margin or options would give you leveraged exposure.

not as good. margin has high borrow fees and path dependency. options are better but still has a lot of fees, slippage, and needs to be adjusted to target appropriate delta. a 3x fund would make it so much easier and cheaper.
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