Alphabet IncGOOGBUYSep 15, 2023Stock price when the opinion was issued
As of Jul 10, 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's bullish the NFL on YouTube. Big tech like Amazon are getting into live sports because advertisers love it. This NFL/YT deal will be bigger and better than those other sports deals and will be a game-changer for GOOG and yet few notice. GOOG shares are up 56% this year, because digital ads are holding up and Google is basically an ad platform. A revenues grew 3.3% in the last quarter over the previous quarter and beat estimates. Search and YouTube ads both did well. The market is slowly waking up to YouTube's ad revenue power but also subscriptions which give stability to the boom and bust ad revenue stream.