GOOG - Alphabet Inc.
| Previous Close | 1,153.58 |
| Open | 1,150.97 |
| Bid | 1,151.20 x 800 |
| Ask | 1,151.58 x 800 |
| Day's Range | 1,148.99 - 1,158.36 |
| 52 Week Range | 970.11 - 1,289.27 |
| Volume | 253,564 |
| Avg. Volume | 1,558,091 |
| Market Cap | 798.802B |
| Beta (3Y Monthly) | 0.99 |
| PE Ratio (TTM) | 28.87 |
| EPS (TTM) | 39.86 |
| Earnings Date | N/A |
| Forward Dividend & Yield | N/A (N/A) |
| Ex-Dividend Date | N/A |
| 1y Target Est | 1,275.00 |
- Yahoo Finance Video•56 minutes ago
Big tech grilled before house antitrust panel
At the big tech hearing yesterday, a lot of the fire was pointed at regulators. Maureen Ohlhausen, former acting chair of the FTC, was a witness at yesterday's hearing, and joins Yahoo Finance to discuss.
- TechCrunch•5 hours ago
AlphaSense, a search engine for analysis and business intel, raises $50M led by Innovation Endeavors
Google and its flagship search portal opened the door to the possibilities ofhow to build a business empire on the back of organising and navigating theworld's information, as found on the internet
- Yahoo Finance Video•17 hours ago
Big tech antitrust hearing in focus
It was a big day in Washington for the top names in Tech. Yahoo Finance Tech Editor Dan Howley joined 'The Final Round' to discuss.
- Yahoo Finance Video•19 hours ago
Sen. Sherrod Brown: Facebook should not be the new Central Bank for the world
Facebook defending its crypto plans on Capitol Hill amid concerns regarding regulation. Yahoo Finance's Seana Smith and Jess Smith and Applico CEO & Portfolio Manager of WisdomTree ‘PLAT’ ETF Alex Moazed discuss.
- Engadget•21 hours ago
Alphabet's Wing introduces an air traffic control app for drones
This spring Alphabet subsidiary Wing LLC became the first drone deliverycompany to receive FAA certification, and the company has successfullylaunched drone delivery service in Australia and Helsinki
- Yahoo Finance•21 hours ago
Lawmaker: We have to 'force' Facebook to change its conduct
Rep. David Cicilline, chairman of the House Judiciary antitrust subcommittee, has a lot of questions for Facebook as
- Reuters•44 minutes ago
RPT-Starting with Netflix, FANG reports to test Wall St rally's mettle
A wave of quarterly reports from Netflix and other top-tier, high-growth companies starting on Wednesday will test Wall Street's willingness to extend a recent really driven by expectations of lower interest rates. Facebook, Amazon and Google-owner Alphabet , all part of the so-called FANG group of widely held stocks, have jumped over 5% so far in July, with investors increasingly willing to bet on the volatile names thanks to expectations the Federal Reserve will cut rates later this month by as much as half a percentage point to support economic growth. The FANG companies, combined with investor favorites Apple and Microsoft, account for about 17% of the S&P 500's $26 trillion market capitalization, making reaction to their quarterly results key to Wall Street sentiment.
- American City Business Journals•55 minutes ago
Google vet who co-founded Ooyala unveils tech to ease data engineer shortage
The Palo Alto company that promises to dramatically reduce the amount of manual labor involved in Big Data raised $19 million and came out of stealth on Wednesday.
- American City Business Journals•1 hour ago
Trump threatens to investigate Google for ‘treason’ following Thiel segment on Fox News
On a new crusade against Google, tech investor Peter Thiel found a sympathetic audience this week with President Donald Trump, who vowed to investigate the tech investor's unsubstantiated claims that Google may have committed “treason” by working with Chinese authorities.
- American City Business Journals•2 hours ago
Report: Google is taking free lunches away from some workers in San Jose
Google was one of the first companies to popularize free food for its employees, and now serves tens of thousands of gourmet meals across the globe every day. But that perk apparently didn’t make it to a new office in San Jose that’s staffed by contractors.
- MarketWatch•2 hours ago
Tech’s day of reckoning on Capitol Hill was long and harsh
Tech’s day of reckoning Tuesday on Capitol Hill started with skepticism about Facebook Inc.’s proposed digital currency, and ended with a spirited debate over charges of anti-conservative bias on Alphabet Inc.’s Google search. In between, the industry’s big four took some body blows from both political parties.
- Bloomberg•3 hours ago
Most of the World’s Companies Are Duds, Stock Picker Says
(Bloomberg) -- Two years ago, an Arizona State University professor made waves with a study showing all the wealth created by U.S. stocks is the result of gains in a weirdly small group of companies. Now he’s back with an update that shows the situation is no cheerier in the rest of the world.Hendrik Bessembinder, a 62-year-old researcher in financial market design, and his team sifted through about 62,000 stocks traded in more than 40 countries between 1990 and 2018. Their finding: about 60% were such duds they did worse than one-month U.S. Treasury notes. The proportion was even greater than in the initial study, which focused on the U.S.The findings have implications for everything from wealth creation to the math measuring investor skill, but got the most notice in the active-vs-passive debate. Since big gains are so rare and yet so crucial to overall returns, it helps explain why stock pickers struggle to keep up with indexes.“It is historically the norm in the U.S. and around the world that a few top-performing companies have great influence over how the market does overall,” Bessembinder, a professor at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State, said by phone. “It’s the norm and I expect it to be the case in the future.”It’s the observation that so few do so much for so many when it comes to the generous gains offered by share indexes. While the equity market as a whole created over $44 trillion in shareholder wealth between 1990 and 2018 and beat Treasury notes, the total is reliant on gigantic, compounding returns from a just a handful of companies, the report says.By themselves, Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp., Alphabet Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Exxon Mobil Corp. accounted for more than 8% of global net wealth creation during the period. Most of the rest generated negative wealth.Investors have heard this refrain before, that just a scant few pull the pack. And it’s easy to see their outsize influence: Microsoft, Apple, Amazon.com and Facebook Inc. account for more than 20% of the S&P 500’s returns this year. That number is even starker for the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100, for instance, where those four companies account for about 50% of gains.But Bessembinder and his team, including two co-authors from Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Goeun Choi of Arizona State, are among the first to look at the phenomenon long-term. The best-performing 306 firms accounted for about three-quarters of global net wealth creation during the 28-year period of the study, they found. Just 811 companies could be framed as accounting for all of it.Their findings echo Bessembinder’s previous work. In looking at nearly nine decades of U.S. stock and bond performance, he found that out of 26,000 stocks, about 58% underperform Treasury bills in their lifespan.To contact the reporter on this story: Vildana Hajric in New York at vhajric1@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Jeremy Herron at jherron8@bloomberg.net, Chris NagiFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
- South China Morning Post•5 hours ago
Donald Trump promises to pursue Peter Thiel's claim that Google has 'treasonous' ties to China
US President Donald Trump has once again put Google in his crosshairs, saying on Tuesday that his administration would look into what he claimed were "seemingly treasonous" ties between the tech giant and China.The statement, tweeted by Trump on Tuesday morning, came after Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel said on Sunday that Alphabet's Google unit was working with the Chinese government instead of the US military and called for the FBI and CIA to investigate the company.Google denied again on Tuesday that is was working with the Chinese military. Photo: Reuters alt=Google denied again on Tuesday that is was working with the Chinese military. Photo: ReutersThiel, who is a Trump campaign donor and also a Facebook board member, made his remarks in a speech at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington."Billionaire Tech Investor Peter Thiel believes Google should be investigated for treason. He accuses Google of working with the Chinese Government," Trump wrote on Twitter, adding, "The Trump Administration will take a look!"In the tweet, Trump described Thiel, one of his top Silicon Valley supporters, as "a great and brilliant guy who knows this subject better than anyone".In a response on Tuesday, Google said in an email: "As we have said before, we do not work with the Chinese military. We are working with the US government, including the Department of Defence, in many areas including cybersecurity, recruiting and health care."Trump's tweet came about an hour after a news clip on the Fox News Channel's "Fox & Friends" show featured Thiel's comments. In a separate interview on Fox on Monday, Thiel suggested that Chinese security services had likely infiltrated Google as it works on an artificial intelligence (AI) project in the country. He did not provide any evidence to support his claims."If you say you're building a Manhattan Project for AI, don't you think that would attract the interest of foreign intelligence agents?" Thiel said on Fox's "Tucker Carlson Tonight" show, adding that he thought the Chinese were competent enough that the Ministry of State Security was likely to have infiltrated Google.Last year, Google faced criticism over its plans to create a censored search engine for China under a project code-named Dragonfly. The investigative website The Intercept reported that the plan was put on hold by after protests by human rights activists and the tech giant's own employees.Google's search engine retreated from mainland China in 2010 amid a major hack of the company and disputes over censorship of search results. But like other Western tech giants, Google has tried to maintain its Chinese foothold in case the market opens up.It launched an AI centre in China at the end of 2017, the first facility of its kind in Asia, which it said was "focused on basic AI research". AI is a controversial dual-use technology that has reportedly been used in Chinese military drones that can conduct targeted strikes without a human making the decision to fire.Trump's tweet caught the attention of Hu Xijin, chief editor of Global Times, a state-controlled Chinese tabloid. "The US has set so many political rules for businesses," Hu said. "This company is patriotic; that company commits treason."This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2019 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Copyright (c) 2019. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
- Bloomberg•7 hours ago
Trump's Tariff Deal Comes Down to a Coin Flip
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Donald Trump has called the European Union a “foe” and has threatened to “tariff the hell” out of the 28-country bloc. So where should we put the chances of the U.S. president agreeing a trade deal with Brussels before he has to face reelection next year? In a surprising burst of cheerful optimism, Germany’s economy minister Peter Altmaier places them as high as 50%. He told reporters last week: “There is a mutual interest to avoid an escalation and to seek a reasonable solution.”In fairness to Altmaier, 50% is only a coin toss. It’s a reasonable enough bet given the capricious nature of Trump (even if you also need to factor in just how tortuous the U.S. and China trade talks have been and the reluctance of EU leaders such as Emmanuel Macron to give any big concessions on cherished markets like agriculture). The EU negotiations began acrimoniously and might still fall apart acrimoniously, but in Trump-world you never can tell.Indeed, judging by the quietly positive mood among trade experts in Brussels, 50% might be a little on the conservative side. There’s a belief there that Trump will want some kind of deal to deliver to voters in 2020, while the EU side will be eager to defuse transatlantic tensions and ease the pain of a slowing world economy. The EU’s recent signing of trade agreements with Japan and the South American trading bloc Mercosur offers encouragement.Still, the scope of any deal (should it happen) would probably be limited to the reduction of tariffs on industrial goods and of technical barriers to trade. It wouldn’t be an all-singing, all-dancing free trade agreement.The idea of cutting tariffs on cars might seem like a big European concession at first glance, considering they’re set currently at 10% in the EU and 2.5% in the U.S. But throw in pickups and trucks, which face a 25% tariff when entering the U.S. versus 10%-22% going into Europe, and you see the mutual interest in an overall cut.So imagine this deal does actually happen: The signature, the handshake, the photo-op. Would that encourage Trump to bury the trade-war hatchet permanently with regards Europe? It’s unlikely. There’s no indication that the dreaded $25 billion auto trade surplus that Germany enjoys with the U.S. would vanish, for one thing. Uri Dadush of the Brussels-based think tank Bruegel reckons a tariff deal’s overall effect on the two blocs’ industrial output would be near-imperceptible. If voters re-endorse Trump’s “America First” call in 2020, he would have a mandate to renew hostilities.To deliver a lasting trade peace, both sides would need look at regulation and taxation as well as tariffs. Two obvious areas of tension are the food safety standards that keep America’s chlorine-washed chickens off European dinner plates and the forthcoming French digital tax on tech giants such as Amazon.com Inc., Alphabet Inc. and Facebook Inc.Altmaier says the French tax – which has infuriated the Trump administration – “shouldn’t” be allowed to impede trade talks. But with the U.S. and EU leaders so divided on core issues such as environmental protection and technology, it will take years to find an agreement beyond an immediate and relatively straightforward tariff deal.As well as the American election, next year will also bring a final ruling from the European Court of Justice on whether U.S. data-privacy standards are too lax to allow the free flow of user data from Europe. If the ECJ rules against the way things are done now, it will prove that the Trump-Europe divide is about far more than the sticker price of a BMW. It will be much harder to bridge as a result.To contact the author of this story: Lionel Laurent at llaurent2@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: James Boxell at jboxell@bloomberg.netThis column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.Lionel Laurent is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Brussels. He previously worked at Reuters and Forbes.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinion©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
- Bloomberg•7 hours ago
Big Tech Is Taking a Bipartisan Beating All Over Washington
(Bloomberg) -- Facebook, Google and Amazon grappled with multiple attacks across Washington from lawmakers and President Donald Trump over a range of grievances that underscored the kind of reckoning the companies could face.House Democrats on Tuesday grilled Amazon.com Inc. over perceived conflicts of interest on its platform, while senators from both parties slammed Facebook Inc. over its plan to introduce a cryptocurrency, saying the company can’t be trusted. Alphabet Inc.’s Google got broadsides from Senate Republicans who complained of anti-conservative bias and from Trump, who said he wants the Justice Department to look into its work in China.The pressure isn’t going away. Facebook Vice President David Marcus is facing another day of testimony Wednesday answering questions about its Libra cyrptocurrency project from the House Committee on Financial Services. Panel chairwoman Maxine Waters has called on the company to stop the project while Congress investigates.The technology platforms that came under fire Tuesday were darlings of official Washington in the Obama years as they grew to dominate their respective markets, from online retail to social media to digital advertising. That admiration has been swept away amid criticism from Republicans and Democrats over competition, privacy and control over content on their platform. At the root of the concerns is the view the companies have grown too big and powerful.Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio called Facebook “dangerous” while Representative David Cicilline, a Rhode Island Democrat, portrayed Amazon as a “trillion-dollar” retailing behemoth that that can crush sellers on its platform. Senator Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, suggested a Google was being evasive. “You’re managing to be less candid than Mark Zuckerberg,” he said, referring to the Facebook chairman and co-founder, who testified before Congress last year.The scrutiny by lawmakers threatens to go beyond criticism of the companies to rein in their business models. Across Capitol Hill Tuesday, lawmakers were zeroing on specific aspects of the companies’ businesses, raising the possibility of legislation aimed at toughening regulation of the industry.Cicilline, who is leading a House antitrust investigation into competition in digital markets, told reporters that his inquiry was still in the fact-gathering stage but that it should eventually lead to legislative steps. Tech companies are incapable of regulating themselves, he said.“I think it will absolutely require some action by Congress, either by way of regulation, new statutory enactments, new resources for antitrust agencies, more likely a combination of those three things,” he said.Cicilline’s committee questioned executives of Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple Inc. about whether they are harming competition. Amazon faced particular criticism with Cicilline suggesting its business model suffers from conflicts of interest and that it can use its control over data to thwart competition from third-party sellers on its platform.Amazon lawyer Nate Sutton denied the company uses data it collects on sales to favor its own products over third-party sellers. He also argued that it’s common in the retail industry for stores to sell their own brands that compete against others.Cicilline fired back: “The difference is Amazon is a trillion-dollar company that runs an online platform with real-time data on millions of purchases and billions in commerce and can manipulate algorithms on its platform and favor its own product -- that is not the same as a local retailer,” he said.In a separate hearing, a bipartisan group of senators told Google’s global policy chief, Karan Bhatia, that they continued to have concerns about the breadth of a liability shield that protects platforms like YouTube and Facebook from lawsuits over content posted by third parties.Cruz, fellow Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri and Democrats Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Mazie Hirono of Hawaii cast doubt on part of a 1996 law that helped internet companies thrive, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, by providing the legal protection.Lawmakers increasingly want to limit that protection, which was already trimmed in cases of sex trafficking last year. They cite concerns about online abuse, hatred, election misinformation and allegations of anticonservative bias.At the Senate hearing on Facebook’s cryptocurrency project, years of missteps over its handling of data and user privacy and exploitation of its platform by Russia in the 2016 presidential campaign caught up with the social media platform as lawmakers from both parties assailed the company and called it untrustworthy.“I don’t trust Facebook,” said Republican Senator Martha McSally of Arizona, “and I’m not alone.”Brown, the committee’s ranking Democrat, denounced the company, calling it “dangerous” and comparing it to a toddler with a book of matches.“Facebook has burned down the house over and over and called every arson a learning experience,” he said.American officials, including Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell and Trump, have expressed skepticism about the Libra project. Facebook has other problems in Washington, including a privacy investigation by the Federal Trade Commission over a scandal involving political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica. Last week, the FTC approved a $5 billion settlement to resolve the case, but lawmakers and privacy advocates objected, saying that it didn’t go far enough.Regulators were aghast that the tech giant wasn’t able to address concerns about money laundering, consumer protection and other potential risks after Facebook presented a white paper to more than a dozen officials from the Treasury Department, the Securities and Exchange Commission and other agencies about the Libra project, the Washington Post reported Tuesday.“The calls to break up, the calls for data privacy laws, the calls for concern around Libra and Calibra are all around this idea of kind of the abuse of the dominance of the platforms, the lack of accountability,” Ashkan Soltani, the former FTC chief technologist, told Bloomberg TV on Tuesday.\--With assistance from Daniel Stoller, Kurt Wagner, Robert Schmidt, Ben Bain and Gerrit De Vynck.To contact the reporters on this story: David McLaughlin in Washington at dmclaughlin9@bloomberg.net;Ben Brody in Washington, D.C. at btenerellabr@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Sara Forden at sforden@bloomberg.net, John HarneyFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
- InvestorPlace•7 hours ago
Here’s Why Patience is the Best Call for Roku Stock
You don't have to look just at the technical charts to understand the appeal of Roku (NASDAQ:ROKU). Thanks to the momentum of rapidly increasing digitalization, smaller companies are able to disrupt much larger establishments. With ROKU, the company specializes in over-the-top streaming devices that essentially bypass broadcast-television platforms (and their associated restrictions); hence, the dramatic rise in the Roku stock price.Source: Shutterstock And it's not just the disruption that has many investors eyeballing this upstart firm. Instead, ROKU has already levered an outsized impact on the broader media landscape. Shortly after its introduction, the company's streaming-TV equipment dominated market share, beating out behemoths like Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG, NASDAQ:GOOGL), and Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL).Even more impressive, ROKU has held onto its overwhelming superiority. For instance, the company leads the connected-TV devices market, accounting for 30% of U.S. sales in the first quarter. Notably, the number-two provider is Sony's (NYSE:SNE) ultra-popular PlayStation network. Obviously, this provides an even greater impetus to buy up Roku stock.InvestorPlace - Stock Market News, Stock Advice & Trading Tips * 10 Best Dividend Stocks to Buy for the Rest of 2019 and Beyond And if that wasn't enough, research firm Strategy Analytics forecasts that Roku's connected-TV devices market share could hit 70%. From that perspective, investors can justify the astounding leap in the Roku stock price.From everything that we see, as well as the company's track record, very few analysts will contest the point that ROKU is a worthy tech name. But the question now isn't whether the streaming-equipment provider has a viable business. Rather, it's whether prospective buyers should consider taking a stab at Roku stock.Although I respect the disruption, I can't recommend going all-in here. Let me explain why: Roku Stock Trading Well Above Its FundamentalsAmong the many bullish factors driving the Roku stock price is the underlying company's monthly active user (MAU) base. In the most recent Q1 earnings report, ROKU registered 29.1 million MAUs on $206.7 million in revenue. Thus, the company generates $7.10 of sales per user.It's an impressive feat because between Q3 2016 and Q3 2018, the revenue generated per MAU appeared to be declining. But come Q4 2018 with its record-busting sales haul of nearly $276 million on 27 million MAUs, the narrative quickly turned incredibly bullish. Click to EnlargeMoreover, Q1 2019's sales-per-user metric of $7.10 exceeded the year-ago quarter's tally of $6.57. In Q1 2017, sales per user measured $7.05. Thus, we're seeing a noticeable shift in individual consumer demand.So why shouldn't investors consider piling into ROKU? Because at some point, the fundamentals matter. Yes, the company dominates the streaming-TV and equipment market ahead of established players. But the established players are all profitable. On the other hand, ROKU is not, which detracts from its overall argument.Let's give credit where it's due. Management has done an incredible job whittling down earnings losses last year. For example, back in 2017, net income measured a whopping loss of $63.5 million. Last year, losses were slightly less than $9 million.But in Q1 2019, the streaming-equipment provider recorded a loss of $9.7 million, noticeably more pronounced than the $6.6 million loss in Q1 2018. Stated differently, the company is in a race to have its revenue potential convert to real earnings.Working against management, though, is the fact that MAU year-over-year growth has steadily slipped from Q3 2017's 48% to Q1 2019's 40%. Plus, current per-user revenue is still down from Q4 2016's haul of $10.99. Just Look at the Charts…At the top, I commented that you don't need to look at the technical charts to gauge Roku's massive outperformance and popularity. But on the flip side, the technicals also provide ammunition for the bears. * 9 Retail Stocks Goldman Sachs Says Are Ready to Rip Consider that on a YOY basis, shares have skyrocketed over 112%. But in terms of revenue, the company gained only 51%. Further, per-user revenue increased by only 8%. Don't get me wrong: these are strong numbers. But I don't they're strong enough to pile in at this price point.Also, please don't confuse this write-up as a perpetually bearish angle on Roku stock. As I mentioned, this company has a firm hold on the OTT market. Therefore, depending on the magnitude of a possible correction, I may be interested in picking some shares up myself.Invariably, though, you must stay agnostic with the markets. Right now, I'm afraid this consumer-tech firm has taken on an almost cult-like furor. Let it cool and at that point reconsider the narrative.As of this writing, Josh Enomoto is long SNE. More From InvestorPlace * 2 Toxic Pot Stocks You Should Avoid * 10 Stocks to Buy for Less Than Book * 7 Marijuana Stocks With Critical Levels to Watch * The 10 Best Dividend Stocks to Buy for the Rest of 2019 and Beyond The post Here's Why Patience is the Best Call for Roku Stock appeared first on InvestorPlace.
