Google’s up 1000% since we first bought it
Being right and being wrong at the same time isn’t a rare occurrence in the stock market when you’ve been trading and investing as long as I have been. Even though I’ve been wrongly bearish about the near-term, as I’ve repeatedly noted, I’m still quite net long with a bias to the Google and the Apple and the Sandisk and my biggest position all year, as I have told you all many times, Facebook. It’s why we use the playbook.
Yesterday, in response to a question in the Live Q&A Chat, I wrote, “I’d rather be long than short $GOOG into tonight’s earnings call, even as I think the real reason to continue holding Google’s stock, as I have since the IPO, is all the innovation and Google Glass and Android upside over the next decade. I’d buy more if the stock gets hit tonight, but I haven’t bought any new GOOG shares in a while now.”
Digging into last night’s report shows lots of strength across lots of core businesses in the Google line-up, from mobile and search to YouTube. Motorola is a billion dollar a year drag on the company right now, but put another way, Motorola’s annual losses are less than one month’s net income for the rest of the company, so it’s not exactly a disaster.
But really, nothing new or shocking either to the upside or the downside in last night’s Google report. It was another in a long string of years of huge growth. I’ve proudly told you readers many times that me and my subscribers first got into Google the day it came public, as I bought it for $95 a share in the open market that very day back in 2004.
Believe or not, just two days prior, I’d gone on CNBC and told Maria Bartaromo that I didn’t plan on buying the stock until after the dust settled. But by the time the stock hit the open market, I’d done a bunch more research on the long-term upside potential for Google and published a big mea culpa and told everybody that I’d had decided that I needed to get in early using my tranche-buying system. So I did a first tranche that first day at about $95 a share and the stock never went lower than that so my next tranches were up in the triple digits.
Long time ago, right? And that brings me to my final point here today. Over the last decade, Google and Apple have both gone up 1000% and 5000% respectively, even as the markets themselves have been roller coasters and up a small fraction of that over that same time frame. You know that I do recommend trimming and scaling rather than putting all your chips down on any one stock at any one price. Certainly Google and Apple were not steady-Betty-consistent climbers over the last ten years, even as their stocks have had such huge gains along the way. There’s been a lot of money made betting on these kinds of Revolutionary Investing companies over the years and I fully expect that over the next five to ten years there will be a lot more money made on these kinds of companies.
So, at any rate, I’m not selling anything today, not even the Google, which is now officially up 1000% since I bought it for the first time back on its IPO day in the open market at $95.
I recently highlighted all the different platforms that Google and Apple have built and which are going to be hugely important in coming decades. For Google, those platforms include:
- The Gmail platform
- The YouTube platform
- The Google Docs platform
- The Google Maps platform
- The Android platform
- The Adsense platform
- The Adwords platform
- The Google Search platform
- The Google Drive platform
- The Chrome platform
I use the word “platform” in each bullet point to drive the point home just how many platforms each company has locked you into. We’re talking about hundreds of millions of people around the planet that are consuming a large and growing part of their daily intake of EVERYTHING on these platforms.
There’s certainly risk in Google at $1000/share and I plan on trimming some or buying some puts to help hedge my Google gains. But it doesn’t have to be today, and it’s not going to be. Long-term all systems go for $GOOG Google.
