After announcing (yesterday) quadrupled profits, it's down hard today.

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The technical picture is ugly, with ominous negative MACD, RSI and volume divergences.

I bet it will go down more than Cisco did from the top in 2000.

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I've never figured out how Google was supposed to make money, let alone how it could be valued so high...

Exactly as pyramid scams make money. That is, until they abruptly stop when all the fools are already in the scheme.

Google can make a lot of money in a lot of different ways.

They could take money so your URL will be top of a search list
They can take money for showing adverts at the side
They can take money to show your URL no matter what.

It would be like the blind auctions of 3g but in the internet world.

Yeah right. Are you the same person who buys gold on ebay?

Google makes money because of consumer spending.

People won't pay google money for showing ads if no one is buying.

Also of interest, BBC comments on Yahoo and Google

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4708659.stm

We were discussing it in the investment forum not so long ago. They have it valued more than Tesco and BT added together. I would rather own just one of those than GOOGLE.

I use the amazon search engine www.a9.com (by Amazon) nowdays and find it better than GOOGLE.

I don't know where the future billions of profit will come from for GOOGLE, it will have stiff competition from Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon, (Ebay soon probably), etc.

The graveyard of search engines is littered with past search engines we would all use, like Lycos, Mamma, Excite. Do GOOGLE really offer that unique a product that it will just keep making more money and face no competition?

Caveat Emptor!

What's wrong with buying gold on ebay?

Practically monopolising the responsibility for dividing the market share of business between the entire worlds' organisations...
I think is DAMNED obvious why they have enormous clout.

The search engine market has no significant barriers to new entrants. All it takes is a bunch of software geeks writing a new piece of innovative technology. Then some venture capitalist will provide a few millions to buy a bunch of servers running it and voila.

Remember Altavista? I do - I would not use anything else at the time.

Google is a supernova. When the explosion is over, it will turn into a black hole (in investors pocket).

So do tell cqnao, what do you know about buying gold on ebay?

cgnao

I hope you havnt hit a nerve with the "gold off ebay" comment

save a fiver then spend 10 postage all to find out youve got a lump of lead, send it back, get your money back minus except for the 20 quid postage, ahh the joys of ebay .

That being said ive just bought 8 books from ebay and ive bought stacks off it, wouldnt really touch "precious- anythings" though myself.

dismissing people out of hand usually hits a nerve.

Arrogant ****.

I've had a few krugers off JPM Jewellers in Southampton at reasonable cost including postage - it depends who you deal with really.

Wouldn't touch shares in GOOG mind

Or rely on technical analysis as a basis for my investment decisions

I am always puzzled as to what motivates such comments.

Please enlighten me.

Read the thread from the top.

It was meant to be a quip.

I don't buy coins, because I would rather not store gold at home. Furthermore bank safe deposit boxes are expensive and inconvenient to access.

goldmoney.com is a far better alternative. It's an allocated account. I.e. you own the gold, not goldmoney, who is just the custodian. You pay goldmoney a commission when you buy and a monthly storage fee. If goldmoney goes bust, their customers retain ownership to the vaulted gold.

This is very different from unallocated gold accounts, where you deposit cash and obtain a generic entitlement to gold, not gold ownership. With unallocated accounts (also known as pool accounts) the gold does not necessarily need to be there and if the account provider goes bust you get back neither cash nor gold. It's like having a current account in gold - the bank does not hold cash to pay everybody.

Large gold investors never handle their gold personally - it's all done using specialised secure vaulting companies (like Brinks, the one used by goldmoney). In fact if a standard 400 oz London Good Delivery gold bar ever exited the circuit of authorised vaults/couriers, it would have to be melted and assayed before being allowed back on the market. Read the details at http://www.lbma.org.uk/GD_Rules_200404.pdf

So if large investors hold and deal in gold sitting in a third party vault, why should I bother holding my coins under the mattress?

Goldmoney charges 3% to buy gold and 0.1 grams (approx 75p) is taken from your holding monthly to pay for storage. You can sell at the spot price at any time. If you have a bank account in the UK you incur no bank fees as Jersey is integrated in the UK clearing system. You can deal at any time and incur no risks of being sold a fake. You own the gold outright so no risks of anyone going bust with your gold.

If you buy krugerrands, the cheapest you'll pay is 4% over spot (assuming you buy in quantity). Then you have to pay for delivery and possibly a safe box. When you sell, you'll be lucky to get spot. Plus obviously postage and packing (unless you live close to a merchant).

And by the way, I have never ever considered buying coins, let alone on ebay.

oh.

I was a bit quick on the draw, eh...Comes from a few too many debates on the subject i suppose.

Yes...TA worked very successfully for me over the period 2000-2003, however I now find the same methods I used over this period are losing me money....if we could really fathom the secrets of the markets from a chart, there would be no debate

Sounds great.

Us small investors will just have stick to paying at 0 - 5% above spot, and then selling at 0 - 5% above spot.

Google as a search engine isn't half bad, the companys value is based on its ability to collect revenue from advertising, ie when you type mortgages it takes to particular mortagege site, when you type in car insurance and so on, its that ability to steer its audience to particular bands is where it money comes from, 9 Million household in the UK alone have broadband and its growing at 100K a month currently, thats an eye watering audience to sell things to, if anything google is probably under valued at present.

OMG, I see an evening star, that changes everything

Seriously.

I have raised capital twice in my life from venture capitalists. You have a wonderfully naive view.

To 'google' has now entered the language. There are massive barriers to entry for new entrants. The fact that Google has got the whole market to itself is one of them.

Had to make me sick didn't you, first I thought It'll be a straight market buy, then it was a staged release of shares to drive it up like a dutch auction/almost. Then $250 (I think 66x 2005 earnings too much) and damned if I didn't think it was getting silly. Now $302.40 guess I am too much of a bear after all with 119.53 PE and over 300$ a friggin share.

119 x Price/Performance Earnings; wtf they own the friggin world.


Oh and say hello to nutch

>The search engine market has no significant barriers to new entrants. All it takes is a
>bunch of software geeks writing a new piece of innovative technology. Then some >venture capitalist will provide a few millions to buy a bunch of servers running it and >voila.
>
>Remember Altavista? I do - I would not use anything else at the time.

When Google launched, the average search engine index size was 10s of millions of web pages. Now, it is billions and approaching 10s of billions. The hardware costs just to do the clever analysis are in the low millions by themselves, the costs of serving queries are in the tens of millions just to get started. The time to gather the web pages is in the order of weeks rather than hours.

As for "All it takes is a bunch of software geeks writing a new piece of innovative technology"... when you come visit me on your very simple anti-gravity personal plane, we can discuss it.

How many google shares did you buy yesterday then?

dont they just cut and paste the code and et voila a new search engine....

I would call it simple like google which is easy type (typing "goo" points the browser there anyway if you ve been before).

Zdnet claim that Google only handles 37% of searches. I've no idea how they measure it, but that's hardly 'the whole market'.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/ITFacts/?p=8400

It's only anecdotal - I work in IT - everyone I know, both in and out of IT uses Google. Haven't used Yahoo for years. Google has it right. Do one thing and do it well. Don't stick bloody banner ads and pop-ups everywhere and, having built the mass market, charge people for targeted adverts.

Almost every site you see these days has ads by Google. Read an article the other day about effectively arbitraging on google. Putting up site after site and selling the ads on there for more than you are paying Google to drive people to the site. Even this site has Google ads.

Current share price $302.
That's on a pe of 119.

During the 1st dot-com boom there were pe's of 400, I know I was working for one!

So could Google hit $1200?

That's the trouble with bubbles, nobody really knows when they're going to blow.
George Soros famously got sucked into the dot-com bubble just before it burst.

Fortunately, as one wall street analyst put it, dot-com bubble number two is largely a one stock bubble.

Having studied the Google data, I m not entirely convinced.

The PE is interesting, the downswing has good shoulders
and the overall transverse is static.

Food for thought.

http://www.financialsense.com/editorials/s.../2005/0722.html

That Google dominates the market is the basic problem it faces.

The internet is now a mature technology. 10 years ago an internet forum by definition meant an online discussion ABOUT computers and the internet. 10 years ago the masses weren't online and for that matter many were literally frightened of the concept.

These days the internet is taken for granted just like TV, telephones and refrigeration. It is assumed that even if you don't have a computer at home, you have the ability to access the internet somewhere. Just like in many parts of the world car ownership is assumed for anyone past their early 20's at the oldest. Just like everyone assumes you have a CD player and an oven.

What's the problem with this? Simple. Once you have dominance in a mature market there is little left that you can do in order to grow beyond simple expansion in line with overall GDP growth.

An oven-led economic boom is out of the question for the simple reason that most people already have an oven. The ongoing demand is for relatively infrequent replacement of ovens and the increase in their numbers in line with the increase in dwelling numbers. The market is saturated so no chance of a boom.

This point has come for Google. It just can't grow at a rapid pace any more. Hence its shares are NOT worth 50 times earnings or anything in that order. Even 20 times earnings would look a little expensive, 14 times would be more reasonable.

We've seen this before. As the older people on this forum will no doubt remember, the electricity industry was literally doubling in size every 10 years until around 1980. In some places it was doubling every 7 years. Power stations were under construction here, there and everywhere and if you go and get a list of major power stations in any developed country you will find an awful lot of those in service today were completed from the 1960's to the 1980's. After that, we had all the power we needed, demand growth permanently slowed to fall in line with overall economic growth and the great power industry growth phase was over.

We've seen exactly the same thing with cars, railways, office blocks, fast food, tobacco and just about every other industry. Initial use is minimal, then comes the major boom when everything gets built and then it slows right down and, in some cases, reverses. If you want an extreme example then look at the enormous volume of asbestos building products produced in the 1950's and 1960's. An industry that barely existied in 1900 and is all but gone (thankfully) today.

It doesn't matter what it is. The boom ends when the market for the product or service is saturated. Then it's either slow growth or, if there's something wrong with it (like asbestos) or something better comes along, it goes into reverse.

The thing about the internet is how quickly it happened. Roads have been around in various forms for a very long time. Railways took more than a century. Electricity took decades. The internet largely happened during the late 1990's. All that's left today is incremental improvements, like broadband, just like all the electricity industry has is brighter lights, air conditioning etc. In both cases the basic task, communications (internet) and lighting and power (electricity) is done.

But what about undeveloped countries? I hear you say. True, there are opportunities there but likewise there are opportunities for power stations (no electricity = no internet), water infrastructure, railways and everything else. This argument points towards Google's share value (relative to earnings) being comparable to those other industries rather than the "blue sky" level it's at today.

Would I invest in Google today? NO.

And I could add that gap in the chart around the 200 level for those into technical analysis. In due course gaps tend to get filled so that implies the price will at some point be significantly lower than it is now.

Exactly the reason why the google creators floated the company! Its at its peak!!!

So what you guys think now ???

Google makes money through a page linking system called adsense. All you need to do is sign up to it and when someone links from your page (any page) to theirs then you get paid as does google.

They take in huge amounts of automated pennies and their business model had to change when the IPO happened. They also have a new system which escapes me now - sorry. They are both based on search and the retailer doesn't have to market to all and sundry.

Everyone a qualified lead and worth the money so the marketeers feel.

Sit back and let the client come to you.

FYI, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtm.../ixcitytop.html