Alphabet Inc (GOOG)

Dominates Search, and with "pull" advertising (whereas META does "push" ads). Huge market share and growing. Now used as a verb, "to google". Some cyclicality. Taking share from traditional ads forms will continue. Cloud is growing nicely. AI will be additive, making most of its products more valuable. Billions spent on R&D "Other Bets", and at least some of these should pay off handsomely. 

It rallied 1.24% today when the market sold off. How to raise shares further? Replace ad sales staff with AI. (Are reports that the company is reorganizing its sales division.)  Cut loose or close down Waymo, their self-driving division; self-driving is not a home run.  Or spin off their cloud division; in their last report, cloud missed estimates. If their NFL coverage and YouTube views increase, then shares will jump. Break up the company into different companies could raise shares to $160.

You don't find many companies growing 20+%, with such an attractive valuation in the low 20s. Big $$ spend on R&D. AI contender. Don't listen to the day-to-day noise. Volatile sector. They own Search, so AI is both opportunity and danger, but that's what risk assets are all about.

Well run, unique capabilities. Valuation still reasonable. Headline PE around 20x, excess cash over $100M on balance sheet, no debt. Factoring out excess cash, trades around 18.5x earnings with good growth outlook. Willing to buy today.

Gen AI will continue to be a force among the Magnificent 7. Nvidia and Microsoft will remain the leaders, but the two sleepers that can outperform Apple in 2024 are Amazon and Alphabet. Apple is quality growth, which he likes, but in 2024, Apple might take a backseat to the rest of the Mag 7.

Is undeterred by last week's allegations that the company faked or exaggerated its AI demo. This remains a cheap stock at 20x forward PE. In fact, this is a growth stock.

It's a bit less than expected, so good news for everyone. As of Q3, it had around $83B in revenue, and 80% of that came from Search. So $100M here and $100M there will take care of it.

Is neither cheap nor expensive, given its amazing balance sheet and wide variety of businesses. Also, it dominates internet search. That chart since early 2022 is a big cup and a more recent small handle. If the share price breaks, it could move $45 higher.

Margins on GOOG and MSFT cloud offerings are double digit. Very profitable, generating a lot of cashflow.

Simple: they need to get their cloud platform back on track. Any growth here will push shares up. Also, would be nice if GOOG quantified their NFL advertising and how it could expand sports on YouTube.

Leader in Search and digital ads, poised to benefit from post-pandemic digital ad spending. Over 70% market share in Android smartphone market. YouTube driving volumes. Determined to be a leader in AI. Hardware sales continue to diversify revenue streams. Revenue's diversified geographically. 

Very reasonable 1.2x PEG ratio. Beat earnings and revenue. Share price is above its climbing moving averages. Forecast 18-20% earnings growth over next few years. No dividend.

We've seen these antitrust cases before. At some point, perhaps the government will be successful, but we haven't seen it yet. North of 90% of searches run through Google. Any deterioration in this would take a long time. Good for the long term. Its AI search seems to be neck and neck with the one from MSFT.

They pivoted to Cloud and did well for 1.5 years, then pivoted to NFL Football and are losing money in it, then pivoted to AI but need to invest more in it. All told, it's a cheap stock that needs to stay focused on YouTube to be worth a lot more.

Has been challenge by an anti-trust investigation and the AI race, but GOOG has the powerful YouTube franchise and internet search. They botched their conference call by not explaining with their Cloud business took a misstep. Didn't explain much of their NFL programming. Cloud should have done better. Poor conference call. There isn't anything wrong with GOOG except that cloud glitch.

They just reported numbers with Cloud revenue missing estimates and management didn't explain why. Management should have also focussed on the strength of YouTube.