Short google?

[sonatine]

Alphabet is a fucking catastrophe. Virtually all of their major projects have faceplanted. And Larry Page has no solutions.

Is google making enough money on advertising alone to justify its share price? I really dont think so.

The other concern here of course is whether or not investors are sophisticated enough to recognize goog is inflated..


But really... self driving cars: nope, and googles most gifted security engineer left to start his own self driving car company. Google fiber: nope. Estimated costs to roll out a POP is one BILLION united states dollars per city because our infrastructure is literally that bad. Those FEMA railway cars filled with servers: nope, the 'alternate internet' was either sidelined for .gov work or simply back burnered.

At some point, the bloom has to come off the fucking rose here, no?

[Brittney Griner's Clit]

The boys down the road building the space ship for their employees to work out of can't possibly help their situation.

[Tellafriend]

The other concern here of course is whether or not investors are sophisticated enough to recognize goog is inflated..

I've learned the hard way that even if you are right, you may not be right. Who didn't see CET's collapse from 20? But I was just a year ahead of when others did so my puts were decimated. Lots of other examples. So, its just a bigger casino without the free drinks.

[Dan Druff]

Google is an odd one to predict.

They have an absurdly dominant position in web search and advertising, and a pretty strong position in web based e-mail.

And while not as lucrative, Google Maps and Google Voice also enjoyed and continue to enjoy big success.

But yeah... they also seem to have a lot of fails, including some weird ideas which were unlikely to succeed in the first place.

Google Wave, anyone? They tried to redefine e-mail by making it real-time, not realizing that people like e-mail partially BECAUSE it's not real-time. Imagine typing an e-mail to your boss telling him he's a controlling asshole and to get off your back, but two minutes later you realize how dumb that is, and erase it before sending. With Google Wave, your boss gets to see you typing it and then erasing it. Brilliant!

[Sanlmar]

Shorting fundamentals. I hear people do that.

Basic look, I see a W pattern with a cup & handle breakout.

Very pre or post election I would be eyeing the big multiples like AMZN. There are a boatload to choose from now.

Don't guess the top. Give up some profit and wait for confirmed failure in a homage to risk/reward.

GOOG merits some attention but not yet - not here.

I applaud the negative energy though Tine.

[sonatine]

Shorting fundamentals. I hear people do that.

Basic look, I see a W pattern with a cup & handle breakout.

Very pre or post election I would be eyeing the big multiples like AMZN. There are a boatload to choose from now.

Don't guess the top. Give up some profit and wait for confirmed failure in a homage to risk/reward.

GOOG merits some attention but not yet - not here.

I applaud the negative energy though Tine.

I do it for the children.


Predictably, some great food for thought being presented here.

[Sanlmar]

I flew the kid home from Vegas this past week (on Spirit lol) and there are signs of trouble in the AMZN paradise.

She's thinking about stepping on some turtles. Sad to hear but Marrissa Mayer style corporate benefits and pay are an anomaly of these times. We will see.

But these are stories of fundamentals and the markets are a completely different thing.

[sonatine]

I mean, AMZN still hasnt turned a profitable year to my knowledge, but they are also notorious for running slave labor and generally being frugal, plus they are going to be first to market with drone deliveries and thats no small thing.

That said, does AWE make money yet?

[limitles]

Two and a half things and do not take these to the bank.

If advertising money has made Google what it is, then that's pretty solid, until another medium comes along. Not newspapers.
Google Fibre may seem like a sinkhole at the momernt, but the potential is great. Think todays situation of wireless conglomerate rape. How does anyone compete at this point? Fibre.
And when war breaks out, these super land lines of communication might look very good to members of the Trump dynasty..

The half is more about the fall of the giants. Microsoft is already dead and Apple has to be a wee bit concerned as Linux for the People is about to flourish. Google doesn't have to worry about that but the others do

[sonatine]

Two and a half things and do not take these to the bank.

If advertising money has made Google what it is, then that's pretty solid, until another medium comes along. Not newspapers.
Google Fibre may seem like a sinkhole at the momernt, but the potential is great. Think todays situation of wireless conglomerate rape. How does anyone compete at this point? Fibre.
And when war breaks out, these super land lines of communication might look very good to members of the Trump dynasty..

The half is more about the fall of the giants. Microsoft is already dead and Apple has to be a wee bit concerned as Linux for the People is about to flourish. Google doesn't have to worry about that but the others do

The google fiber thing is really interesting and sad... ATT has sunk 160bn into their broadband and wont even discuss what they are spending on lawyers to aggressively cockblock google fiber. Like right now, this instant, ATT is blocking googles access to the fucking telephone poles they need to string up their cable. So above and beyond the fact that google has to effectively build out a POP from scratch to support its product, ATT's making sure that they cant even begin to do so without a lengthy and expensive fight *in every city they target*.

Honestly, dont expect a happy ending in the near term for google fiber, and certainly dont expect it to turn a profit in the next decade or so.

[Crowe Diddly]

I mean, AMZN still hasnt turned a profitable year to my knowledge, but they are also notorious for running slave labor and generally being frugal, plus they are going to be first to market with drone deliveries and thats no small thing.

That said, does AWE make money yet?

Once amazon fully unleashed their cloud services/AWS, yeah, they are RAKING in the dough. 5 profitable quarters in a row, and rising. They used to just shovel all their extra money into their next big things, but now they have so much profit they can't even re-invest it all safely in their own projects, and have stopped trying to.

If advertising money has made Google what it is, then that's pretty solid, until another medium comes along. Not newspapers.
Google Fibre may seem like a sinkhole at the momernt, but the potential is great. Think todays situation of wireless conglomerate rape. How does anyone compete at this point? Fibre.

Problem is, another medium kinda has come along, in the way of Apps. Google's ad revenue is based of searches, browser activities, shit like that. App traffic on the internet is quickly gaining on open web traffic, and that's no bueno for the long term google ad business. They can't spider all the info that used to be everywhere when now large parts of it are in the internet's walled gardens.

[sonatine]

also, ad blockers are real and given the volume of hostile/rogue 'ads' on the internet, google is basically trying to sell bareback sex in haiti.

[limitles]

Two and a half things and do not take these to the bank.

If advertising money has made Google what it is, then that's pretty solid, until another medium comes along. Not newspapers.
Google Fibre may seem like a sinkhole at the momernt, but the potential is great. Think todays situation of wireless conglomerate rape. How does anyone compete at this point? Fibre.
And when war breaks out, these super land lines of communication might look very good to members of the Trump dynasty..

The half is more about the fall of the giants. Microsoft is already dead and Apple has to be a wee bit concerned as Linux for the People is about to flourish. Google doesn't have to worry about that but the others do

The google fiber thing is really interesting and sad... ATT has sunk 160bn into their broadband and wont even discuss what they are spending on lawyers to aggressively cockblock google fiber. Like right now, this instant, ATT is blocking googles access to the fucking telephone poles they need to string up their cable. So above and beyond the fact that google has to effectively build out a POP from scratch to support its product, ATT's making sure that they cant even begin to do so without a lengthy and expensive fight *in every city they target*.

Honestly, dont expect a happy ending in the near term for google fiber, and certainly dont expect it to turn a profit in the next decade or sentinfso.

Yeah for sure this is down the road thinking. And if AT&T is spending big bucks trying to protect their god given rights to telephone pole infrastructure, then they are throwing good money after bad. Telephone polls are so 20th century

I'd hate to be a lawyer presenting the case for such a monopoly. (then again, it pays well)

[Krypt]

The FANG stocks have been killing it for several years now, but if history is any guide this is exactly the kind of action that always precedes a thundering correction. You guys are citing potential, but these advancements/profits have been priced in already, and then some. At the start of 2015, the fang stocks had a combined market cap of $740B and combined 2014 earnings of $17.5B; so that's a valuation multiple of 42x which on its surface isn't entirely bubbly but lets look at what happened this year. At the end of August 2016, the FANG stocks were valued at $1.3 trillion, meaning they have gained $570B of market cap or basically 80% in the last 19 months. These are momo stocks and as the old wall street adage goes: they take the escalator up and the elevator down.

The four horseman of Microsoft, Cisco, Dell, and Intel from the late 90s/ early 2000s arent exactly ancient history, and we all know how that ended. I certainly see the parallels folks and no, this time is not different.

[sonatine]

from what im reading about apple's sep 7 offerings, one could easily justify tossing apple on the short pile as well, because literally everything they teased about the iphone 7 isnt coming until 2017, except of course the shit thats horrible (no headphone jack so on), and their laptop offerings are nothing but purse candy this year.

[limitles]

Once amazon fully unleashed their cloud services/AWS, yeah, they are RAKING in the dough. 5 profitable quarters in a row, and rising. They used to just shovel all their extra money into their next big things, but now they have so much profit they can't even re-invest it all safely in their own projects, and have stopped trying to.

If advertising money has made Google what it is, then that's pretty solid, until another medium comes along. Not newspapers.
Google Fibre may seem like a sinkhole at the momernt, but the potential is great. Think todays situation of wireless conglomerate rape. How does anyone compete at this point? Fibre.

Problem is, another medium kinda has come along, in the way of Apps. Google's ad revenue is based of searches, browser activities, shit like that. App traffic on the internet is quickly gaining on open web traffic, and that's no bueno for the long term google ad business. They can't spider all the info that used to be everywhere when now large parts of it are in the internet's walled gardens.

Apps, perhaps. I'd hitch my wagon to the advertising machine wherever it goes. Google is well versed in the game obv.
Grabbing a piece of the broadband provider pie means more eggs and more baskets

[Sanlmar]

What you say about about AMZN employees' condition is true. Ruthlessness that leads to burnout.

The warehouse workers offer the easiest example. It's no different in corporate.

When your function or dept has run its course you are cut. You are not transferred elsewhere.

However, AMZN has made a ton of acquisitions and generally they let the company run as before hands off. Until that company starts to miss.

The market is hungry enough for AMZN talent though so no tears.

Daughter was showing me spreadsheets that she literally sends to China nightly. Data as piecework. There isn't a fucking thing that they don't outsource to women and children offshore if you wish not to be burdened by it.

Of course, AMZN brought you the mechanical Turk so maybe that offers the best insight into the meat grinder.

[Dan Druff]

I flew the kid home from Vegas this past week (on Spirit lol) and there are signs of trouble in the AMZN paradise.

She's thinking about stepping on some turtles. Sad to hear but Marrissa Mayer style corporate benefits and pay are an anomaly of these times. We will see.

But these are stories of fundamentals and the markets are a completely different thing.

You flew your kid home on Spirit? Shame on you. I wouldn't fly my ancient pug home on Spirit.

Did your daughter say that Amazon itself is having trouble, or that Bezos is finally tired of Zappos' wacky ways under Hsieh?

For your examination: http://fortune.com/2016/03/04/amazon-zappos-holacracy/

Your daughter has far more exposure to Zappos than I do, but I've dealt with them quite a bit since receiving about $6,000 worth of gift cards (not exaggerating) from various casino promotions I did in 2012.

I still haven't used them all, even when giving usage of them to Ben's mom.

I guess I could have been with Beth Shak, and she would have gone through them in 10 minutes.

But back to Zappos.

It amazed me what a failsite they were (and still are) running.

It was full of longstanding bugs and had a cumbersome, confusing interface.

The bugs were especially bad when it came to using gift cards.

I reported these bugs to them, and yet years passed and nothing got fixed.

Finally I asked WTF was gong on, as it was making it tough to complete my orders without having to call them in some cases. I was finally told the truth by a frustrated employee:

"We know all about these bugs. We know about many other bugs. We have this weird structure here where these things just don't get done. It's so hard to get a single bug fixed, and nobody understands why."

It's not like Zappos is constantly innovating new features on their site, and is tolerating longstanding bugs in order to develop new, eye-popping features. It's basically the same site since I first used it in 2012.

What does the IT department do with their day at Zappos? Nobody knows.

I was pretty shocked by this. I always thought Zappos was the un-corporation, nimble and able to cut through bureaucratic BS.

Apparently not.

Maybe Bezos is just getting tired of it.

[4Dragons]

Once amazon fully unleashed their cloud services/AWS, yeah, they are RAKING in the dough. 5 profitable quarters in a row, and rising. They used to just shovel all their extra money into their next big things, but now they have so much profit they can't even re-invest it all safely in their own projects, and have stopped trying to.

If advertising money has made Google what it is, then that's pretty solid, until another medium comes along. Not newspapers.
Google Fibre may seem like a sinkhole at the momernt, but the potential is great. Think todays situation of wireless conglomerate rape. How does anyone compete at this point? Fibre.

Problem is, another medium kinda has come along, in the way of Apps. Google's ad revenue is based of searches, browser activities, shit like that. App traffic on the internet is quickly gaining on open web traffic, and that's no bueno for the long term google ad business. They can't spider all the info that used to be everywhere when now large parts of it are in the internet's walled gardens.

Yeah just a couple of points here.

Google's ad revenue is based off of a couple of kinds of search traffic; Google Adwords, where you search and then ads are displayed at the top and sidebar of the search engine results. The other part is Google AdSense, where you can sign up to receive ads ON your site and you get a CPC for every visitor that clicks an ad.

When it comes to Apps.. and the fucking phones... Google IS Android. Android IS Google. The Google Play Store is Google and the Apps in it are hosted by Google. So they very much do have a handle on the App end of the business and everything associated with it. You may have heard of Google's App Ad platform.. AdMob

The other thing is that there are only a handful of factors that would contribute to the main business's demise:
A competitor who is:
cheaper
more effective
has better reach

Right now the most effective ad platform is Facebook, hands down. In some cases it is cheaper than Google Adwords in CPC and CPA, but the thing is that the Facebook ecosystem is NOT the same ecosystem as Google. Different sets of eyeballs altogether (set that tracking pixel you bitches).

In summary; Google has a shotgun approach to defining the future and hitting a home run with a number of projects. If any of them goes as planned, we all benefit from it. If they don't, nobody is really threatening their core business with 'the next Google'.

[sonatine]

Whats funny about the FB ad thing is that ad-blockers like ABP are basically cutting FB a ton of slack. EG the recent shift to embedded ads in news feeds; ABP doesnt block those in the free version. But they fucking nail them in the pay version, and FB has been in full blown toddler meltdown mode over it. Gotta wonder what happens when they piss ABP off to the point where they bless the free version with the same code.

Regardless, I think FB is an example of stable, reliable market value because they arent doing shit like trying to build fucking modular phones and eyeglasses with HUDs, then mothballing them after spending hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in R&D.