Alphabet Inc (GOOG)

(A Top Pick Oct 21/14. Up 37.53%.) He liked the way they were positioned. Have finally started to deliver on earnings in the past couple of quarters and the multiples increased. People like the restructuring. They own the most powerful smart phone operating system globally, in Android which they are giving away for free.

(A Top Pick Feb 19/15. Up 31.28%.) He continues to like this. The multiple has crept up a little bit over this last year. Earnings have continued to grow. Trading at 20X earnings (17.5 if you strip out the cash). A great company and they dominate the business that they are in.

He is going for the new company, the hold-co. There are two businesses. The old legacy stuff is separated, but this has the rest as well. It has long term upside. It generates tons of cash. He is looking forward to their first earnings release. He took a small position just to see. He thinks the market will have better visibility and will like it.

(Top Pick Nov 19/14, Up 22.75%) It’s now called Alphabet (name change only). This name change tells him that there are so many things inside that they have not monetized. They know so much about you. It does not matter what goes on in China, this one will do well. You may see them spinning off businesses into separate companies.

They are doing a lot of interesting things. The way they restructured their company made a lot of sense. They have lots of cash and a great balance sheet. He thinks they should be paying a dividend.

(Top Pick Sep 30/14, Up 8.17%) They monetized a lot of the initiatives of some years ago. The big thing that is happening is that they are becoming a real company. They respond to their stakeholders. The street is very positive to their management change. They have grown into their stock price. They are reasonably priced. They are growing at 20% still.

Had a flat period then it broke out. It has been consolidating. It looks positive technically.

This is doing well, mainly more recently because they have a new CFO that is really disciplined in terms of bringing value to the stocks. He doesn’t see selling this anytime soon.

GoogleL is the place you want to be. This is the A stock and it comes without voting rights. This one has been doing slightly better.

The premise of what they are doing with Alphabet will benefit the shareholders. There have been a number of changes that have happened within the last 3-4 months. New CFO has made the company a little bit more investor friendly. They now have to justify how much money they are spending, as well as how much money they are losing on these ventures. They still dominate the search business. YouTube is becoming a bigger and bigger factor in the entertainment side of the business.

(A Top Pick Sept 16/14. Up 12.04%.) This is a dominant player in so many different technologies, that you have to own these kinds of companies. Trading at a very, very reasonable multiple and growing like stink. Between Apple and this company, they have every single mobile subscriber in the world, in one way or another.

There have been a number of changes to the company in terms of structure. The company will now be called Alphabet, and Google is a division of Alphabet. It is still a company that is involved in Search. They have been successful in monetizing some of their initiatives, most particular YouTube, and have a number of other things that the market is coming to believe will be able to be monetized. Also, have a new CFO that has a more traditional background, and the street likes that. The one thing investors were nervous about was the unpredictability of Google.

He would continue to hold this one. This is a fantastic franchise. They own search and it is trading at a market multiple. The growth is there.

Disclaimer: His son works as software engineer at Google. Recently, Google's stock had a big jump after they announced their quarterly results. He thinks it is still a very, very interesting stock. Google is a wild card because you don't know what they will do next. They are always coming out with fabulous products, like driverless cars. They are an innovative company with lots of cash. They keep making money on advertising and the search. He is a happy holder of this stock.

A very hard thing to quantify because of risks of Europe and antitrust. A great franchise. The risk you have is that it is so dominant in its category that it gets penalized or broken up or something the way Microsoft (MSFT-Q) did 10-15 years ago. Doesn’t think Europe should do anything in the way of antitrust, and if they don’t it is a great buy.