Alphabet IncGOOGBUYApr 24, 2018Stock price when the opinion was issued
As of Jul 13, 2026. Market Open.
Fears that AI would eat its lunch. Harder for Anthropic to monetize a new tool than for GOOG to take AI and apply it to a business model that it already monetizes. Muscle memory of the populace gravitates to GOOG to find information. Probably thrives in the new AI world, until something more disruptive comes along.
AI monetization is happening, and AI Mode has been a game changer. Stronger cloud growth (revenue grew 63% YOY last quarter, tremendous), broader monetization across platforms. Search and advertising remain strong, lots of cashflow. Also a great ecosystem.
Good growth, but relatively decent valuation. Yield is 0.25%.
A year ago, consensus was that Search was going to die. Seems ridiculous now. Gemini is overtaking ChatGPT. Data centre business is growing faster than before. Still not that expensive. He hasn't sold any shares yet, but may take some off the table from the long-term holding and put toward one of the Mag 7 laggards.
He likes Google at the present level. If it drops another 5%, he will like it even more. It is showing strong earnings growth. He thinks this is a great business at a reasonable price. If you strip out the cash portion of the price of Google, the stock trades (net of cash) at about 17x earnings. This has a dominant position in online advertising and continues to grow 20% per year, year over year. He sees this as a value stock. This company has spent a lot of R&D money. The public markets haven’t liked this but he thinks that’s the right thing to do.