Alphabet IncGOOGHOLDMar 20, 2025Stock price when the opinion was issued
As of Sep 04, 2026. Market Open.
This one, but don't put all your eggs in the one basket. It just has so many horses in the race. About 75% of revenue comes from advertising. Cloud business generates a whole lot of money. Very strong with Gemini, and now agentic AI has come out. Robust short-term liquidity. Current and quick ratios are well above 1. Low debt-to-equity. ROE of 38.1%. PE is ~17x.
The #1 holding in his fund. His 12-month price target is $428. Buy some here, more around support at $320. Shouldn't go under $300.
Revenue's grown 26% on average, per year, for the last decade. That's quite transformative. Subscriptions plus cloud are growing quickly. Valuation's quite attractive compared to historical comparisons. Attractive entry level at 16.7x forward PE. Small yield of 0.26%.
(Analysts’ price target is $428.18)That was an eye-opener. The Mag 7 has peaked, and it could be a multi-year peak due to the negative free cash flow. GOOG is one of the winners in AI. Once the PE declines or AI spending slows, the stock could react better. The street would be very disappointed if only the core businesses of the Mag 7 were generating free cash flow growth and AI was not. It's tough to look through AI spend and invest the Mag 7 which remain great companies, but now face the biggest risk in years.
He trimmed a little early this year, but likes it. Their relationship with the customer is strong across its platform. Secondly, growth is remarkable. Also, the valuation is reasonable. Their AI model is not the best, but it's competitive. Can you keep your eyeballs on a Google product? Yes. Gemini is integrated in their search, so that removes the threat to their search.
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.
Likes the acquisition of Wiz, the leader in cloud security. There are synergies between the two. Not clear whether Wiz now favours GOOG, or is still cloud-agnostic. Overall, more benefits than negatives.
Well positioned for the long term. GOOG invented a lot of the fundamental building blocks of AI, yet they get no credit for all that technology. The reason is that they're not good at creating commercial products. Outside of Search, all of their successful products are through acquisition -- YouTube, Android, Google Maps. So the market's wondering if it can make the transition to a generative AI future.
This helps explain why the multiple's where it's at. They could turn all this around and it would be an opportunity, but it'll probably take a change in leadership. Take a look at the history of MSFT since 2012.