CNNMoney: Google sees its largest 1-day loss ever

[DeepModem Mom]

Google sees its largest 1-day loss ever
Yahoo! results, worries about Internet advertising market, U.S. search inquiry spark sell-off.
January 20, 2006


NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) - Google stock posted its largest single-day loss ever Friday as investors showed concern about prospects for the Internet advertising market and the company's role in a Justice Department lawsuit about Internet searches.

Shares in Google sank $36.98 to $399.46 -- about 8.5 percent -- in heavy trading on Nasdaq. Volume of 31 million shares was nearly triple the normal daily average.

The loss was the largest in both dollar and percentage terms. The shares previously lost 8.31 percent on Nov. 5, 2004. The previous record for dollar decline was $22.20 on Jan. 18, 2006.

Investors sent Yahoo tumbling Tuesday after the largest Internet media company surprised investors by posting earnings below expectations.

Google said Thursday it was resisting a Justice Department subpoena that the company turn over search records for a case regarding an anti-pornography law....


http://money.cnn.com/2006/01/20/technology/google_stock/index.htm?cnn=yes

[TroglodyteScholar]

1. Maybe...

...they could split their stock a time or two so we regular folks wouldn't have to take out a loan to invest.

Pheh.

[Piscis Austrinus]

21. I wouldn't touch the stock market right now

A fellow in the late twenties - a very rich fellow - said that he knew it was time to get out of the market when the shoeshine boys were giving stock tips.

This is where we are now. Investment in the market is higher than it's ever been, and this is because of the number of smaller-portfolio investors like you and me out there, millions of us pumping our tens of thousands of dollars into the economic engine.

When the crash came, a lot of upper-middle-class people discovered what it was like literally to be penniless. Imagine going from a 75K/year job to a bread line. Imagine that your boss is in line in front of you.

The guys who came out best were the ones with cash. And a lot of them got their cash by selling their stocks just in time. I leave it to you to figure out who they sold their stocks to.

Now imagine this happening here and now. Imagine what happens in the real estate market when suddenly a lot of people lose their shirts in the stock market. It doesn't matter whether you have a single share or a million shares, if all the shares are worthless.

The only possible good that could emerge is the good that came from the Depression: we got sixteen years of Democrats after Hoover limped through his term. And we needed all sixteen, because the Republicans - with their same, tired, deceitful, one-trick dog-and-pony bait-and-crash show - had completely trashed our economy.

Of course, it could be worse.

There was another country in this century that saw its economy go to hell, to the point that their currency became so worthless that if you earned a million an hour and worked twenty-four hours a day, it would have taken you about 960 years to earn one US dollar.

That country was so wiped out that the idea of some obscure ex-con army corporal with a funny moustache, a great oratorical delivery and a lot of armed, menacing friends running their country seemed like a good idea.

It can happen to us, people. And if our countrymen don't wake up and see it, it will happen. Not might, not could - WILL.

Peace
PsA

[spotbird]

23. That rich fellow was supposed to have been Joe Kennedy

Which is possible since he did well during those difficult times.

[6th Borough]

28. He sold short immediately before the '29 crash. The collapse...

of the stock market made Joe a fortune.

[BlueIris]

54. Self-delete. Sorry. Major brain spasm.

:)

[sarcasmo]

38. I cheer when the stock market falls and my wife just looks at my like I am

crazy. I just love it when ultra rich people loose a bunch of money. IMHO, money is all they care about.

[Zynx]

41. Most stock market losses don't hurt the really rich that much

They tend to have very well constructed portfolios aimed at perserving wealth and generating income at a steady rate, no matter what.

The people who are hurt the most by stock market crashes are the middle class - amature investors and people relying on company pension plans that are dependent on stock market returns for their funding.

[sarcasmo]

53. Tell that to Google.

[Zynx]

61. ?? How is that related to my post at all?

Google getting hammered isn't hurting rich people to any significant degree - rich people have portfolios of dozens of stocks. Google would never be a core holding - massive PE, inherently risky - so it's really not a major concern to someone with major assets.

[Roland99]

33. I've been saying for months to get out.

It's being propped up. A few short-term gains aren't worth losing it all as we near a precipice leading us to another Great Depression.

[fasttense]

31. Wait a minute, didn't the DJIA drop by over 200 points yesterday?

It wasn't just Google that dropped. A whole lot of stocks came tumbling down. It wasn't Goggle's standing against the right-wing wackos that caused their stock to fall. It was the deficit, high oil prices, negative savings rate, housing bubble pop and general poor management of the US's economy by the brush regime.

[oostevo]

45. Yes, but ...

The Dow was down 1.96%. Google fell 8.47%. That's a big difference. Further, Google had a trading volume of 41,182,889, almost more than four times the average volume.

Something was definitely up with traders on Friday. I'd guess that it was their fear of a court-ordered injunction of some sort. But that's just my guess.

[fasttense]

59. Hmmm oostevo, you have a point.

What with the volume and percent loss. But even though the Dow was only down 1.96% folks who are still playing the stock market tell me their portfolios dropped 6%. They had fairly diverse portfolios too.

But perhaps you are right, something is going on with Google stock.

[Hyernel]

2. Google Earth is wads of fun!!

Just released for MacOS X.

I could see my house from there!

[951-Riverside]

3. Its a damn shame it really is

...I wonder how much the U.S government is secretly investing & inflating these companies?

[Rich Hunt]

46. some right-wingers despise google

...for some reason, long before this latest incident vs. the justice dept.

[CountAllVotes]

4. dumbest thing I've ever seen

making a big deal out of a search engine. There are many others besides google. $400 a share is wayyyyyy over priced! Maybe $40 is more like it if even that much. If they turn over their search engine records, it will be worh .04 cents MAYBE! :grr:

:kick:

[Warren Stupidity]

7. I thought it was dumb at $100.

Boy was I dumb.

Google is not just a search engine. But I still agree with you that $400 is dumb.

[Carni]

14. Can someone explain to me why it hasn't split?

I mean in terms for morons (I am not stock savvy but I thought the 100 mark was typically where companies decided to make a split)

[KeepItReal]

22. They admire Berkshire Hathaway...currently $89,000 per share

Google's founders said they arent big fans of stock splits.

http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=BRKa&d=t

[oostevo]

48. There's no reason to.

It doesn't change the valuation of the company in any way. It just makes the company's stock cheaper, which is tends to have a phycological effect on investors (who think that the stock is cheaper, hence buying more shares).

There's a pretty good overview of stock splits here:
http://www.investopedia.com/articles/01/072501.asp

[swag]

17. AMD is dumber, with a P/E of 525, compared to 17 for INTC.

GOOG has a P/E of 89.

I don't see its earnings growth as justifying that, but I'm not a stock-picker, I'm an indexer.

[Roland99]

34. That's nothing. Ebay had a P/E of over *11,000* back in the dot-com bubble

[swag]

39. There was a slug of companies with infinite P/Es, of course,

or divide-by-zero errors, if you prefer.

[CountAllVotes]

63. I am OUT of the stock market

I sold everything I had left in it in July. I took a loss of about $500 for the year. :grr: I realize it could have been a lot more, but I didn't have that much in it and was going NOWHERE.

:kick:

[6th Borough]

29. Well, they did haul in 4 billion in profits off nothing more than Adwords.

Ya know, those Google sponsored ads that attempt to correlate what you are reading with a product you might want to purchase (with occasional hilarious results.) A nickle or so at a time...

And that's for a single quarter. Hell, might have been 9 billion; I'm a bit sleep deprived at the moment.

Not that I disagree that the stock is exceptionally overpriced. Just wanted to point out how much revenue one of the simplest (in appearance) websites generates. A nickle at a time.

[electron_blue]

56. I agree. Google is not in the search-engine business. They are

in the advertising business.

[electron_blue]

55. So, how do you explain that Yahoo still maintained its price (more or less

even after giving up all their records to the feds.

[Rex]

5. Just lovin that free enterprise!

Benito Mussolini would be proud of our gummits control over the population and industry. What will be next? Random trash can searches? 1 million random citizens picked to have just portions of their homes search (warrant...what's that?).

[llmart]

6. Well, I for one, am looking forward to government agents......

searching my trash cans. I just picked up all the dog poop in my yard after the snow melted and it's in there, so to the government agents, have at it!!!

[OKthatsIT]

13. LOL....

[mahatmakanejeeves]

8. Google Shares Have Biggest Drop After Justice Suit

It costs a lot of money to resist the federal government.

Google Shares Have Biggest Drop After Justice Suit

Jan. 20 (Bloomberg) -- Shares of Google Inc. had their biggest drop ever after the company was sued by the U.S. Justice Department to hand over information on Web searches and as concern mounted that sales growth may slow.

``People do not like seeing companies in which they're invested getting subpoenas from the Department of Justice,'' Standard & Poor's analyst Scott Kessler said in an interview. ``What is more troubling is that Google chose to not comply.''

Shares of Google dropped $36.99 to $399.46 in Nasdaq Stock Market composite trading, closing below $400 for the first time in two months. More than 40.7 million shares were traded, the most ever since Google went public in August 2004. Google led the Nasdaq Composite Index down 2.4 percent.

To contact the reporter on this story:
Jonathan Thaw in San Francisco at [e-mail].

Google quotes

Hardcore information junkies will want to go to the Securities and Exchange Commission's Edgar site.

EDGAR Company Search

Google IPO SEC Filing Analysis, April 2004

Let's look at the Form S-1 Registration Statement required for the public offering of shares.

Go down to "Principal and Selling Stockholders" on page 84, and you'll see that Page and Brin owned 38 million shares each in before the company went public. Their total was just a shade more than 50% of the 151 million shares before the public offering. I don't know how many shares they hold now, but for the purposes of doing the math, let's use the figure of 38 million.

The stock closed yesterday at $437 per share, and after a $37 per share decline, it closed this afternoon at $400 per share. 38 million times $400 is ... oh, they're not starving. It's $15.2 billion each. Yesterday, when the stock was selling for $437 per share, they were worth $16.6 billion, so each lost $1.4 billion as a result of the government's action. Disclaimer: the stock has been going down for the past few days anyway, but today's decline was the steepest the company's stock has ever experienced.

Now suppose you were a staffer in a Republican congressional office, the Department of Justice, or even the White House, and you knew ahead of time that your bosses would be going after Google. Imagine the money you could make by using this advance information and shorting the stock.

[Mr_Spock]

9. `What is more troubling is that Google chose to not comply.

Market people are Nazi's too I guess.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

10. His split infinitive aside...

the remark sort of makes me wish that someone goes through his trash can and scavenges his credit card receipts.

[anotherdrew]

12. maybe the plunge prevention team just didn't do any prevention on google?

with the governemnt interveaning in propping up the market, anything is possible. There's nothing saying they need to or must prop up all companies equally. IF there really is such a body as the PPT, and I have no doubt that there is, why are we letting them act with zero oversite, zero rules, basicly lawlessly?

[electron_blue]

58. Yahoo caves to feds & gives up their records. Anyone here still use Yahoo?

[Peace Patriot]

11. People here seem to be missing the point. As with Knight-Ridder, the

Bush junta and its rightwing cabal are targeting the last enterprises that show any independence of mind, any feistiness, any sense of democracy and fairness. And when one of them fights back you guys upthread complain about the price!

That's not the story here. The story is that GOOGLE IS FIGHTING BACK IN DEFENSE OF THE FIRST AMENDMENT! Please, those among us who have bucks, use some of them in defense of freedom and independence! Don't let the monsters of this Bush junta, and its torture memo writer and Bush Cartel toady Alberto Gonzales, shove Google around! Support Google! If you are in a position to advertise, do so! If you can invest, do so! If you can write letters, and stay on top of this incredible story of Bush junta spying and intimidation, do so! For godssakes, fascism is staring us in the face! Fight back with whatever tools you have!

[OKthatsIT]

15. and...I'm sure Rove has sent out his 'propaganda moles' to all the blogs

[DeepModem Mom]

18. Yep, Google is fighting back. nt

[Zynx]

26. Google stock is still waaaay overpriced.

I don't touch stocks with shifting rationals for ownership. I've heard about four different reasons to own Google in sequence.

[go west young man]

27. Totally right! This is just the governments way of controlling

our lives in the long run. They have to control the internet and Google is the biggest player out there. Many here many not realize it but they have been busy infiltrating the big search engines just as they did the MSM way back when. For example Dan Senoir was recently hired by Google. I can't remember his exact job but i think he was coalition spokesman in Iraq until 2004. So the right wingers are already moving thier chess peices around so they can effect our thinking.

[6th Borough]

30. Is it crazy to think that Google might actually become MORE popular by...

not sharing private information?

Probably is, considering how large a slice of the search engine (and by way of it, online advertising) market Google already has sitting on its plate.

But...if I, personally, relied on Yahoo or MSN up until this point...which I don't...I would most definitely switch over to the company that isn't divulging private information. Ya know, a company that (<i>gasp</i>) respects the privacy of its patrons. I would pull down a Yahoo email account and trade it in for Gmail while I was at it.

[NVMojo]

16. And the asshat conservatives say liberals are bad for business??

jerks!

[GoddessOfGuinness]

19. How long before the government steps in to save the day

by taking control of the internet?

[Piscis Austrinus]

20. Just a guess, tinfoil hat optional: what this is REALLY about

If I remember correctly, most search engines examine page headers as one of the primary bases for generating hits. This is why, when you do a search on certain, ah, suggestive phrases ("Japanese schoolgirls," to quote Al Franken), you get an avalanche of sites that are basically just dead-ends for advertisements rather than said oriental moppets.

However, if once you hit one of those sites, you will find another avalanche entails, which will land squarely in your email basket.

I really think that this whole business has nothing to do with terrorism, or even anti-porn activities. I think these guys are data mining, only using the internet instead of warrantless wiretaps, searches and infiltrations.

My gut feeling is that the current administration is building an enemies database. Am I alone in this?

Mike? Do you reaaallllly think this is the way America is supposed to be?

PsA

[upi402]

25. aahhh..ahHAH! That's how they know my penis needs enlarging!

Thanks for sharing...
:shrug:

[nolabels]

60. If you need a little extra just contact the Bushco D.O. J.,

The obviously been handed a large helping that they are trying to spread around ;-)

[CantGetFooledAgain]

35. My theory is something like that

A set of raw logs from Google would be a virtual "blackmail database". It's a simple matter to trace the IP addresses in the log back to their source, let's say a residential or office network. Then match the names in the list against anyone who might be in a position to harm you, let's say a Congressperson or reporter. Then you simply let this person know that you know that on a certain date he was searching for "Japanese schoolgirls".

After that, no more "difficult questions" from that reporter. No more inconvenient votes from that Congressperson. And as the word spreads about what they "have" on everyone, no more dissent at all.

[electron_blue]

57. This scares me. Once my ISP provider sent me a legal notice

claiming they had *PROOF* that I downloaded and sold a movie at my IP address. I denied it, they threatened to take me to court unless I agreed to remove the movie from my computer. I refused to "remove" it bcs it was never onthe computer in the first place. No way was I going to admit guilt just to get them off my back. They threatened me several times with legal action and claimed they could prove I did this - with their legal records of my IP address activity, I called their bluff, and they caved, didn't pursue it, and credited my account with $.

Boy you should have heard the tough talk from them for a month or two, really sounded like they had me with "internet records". I think this could be a valuable tool for Bushies - claim they can prove something you did with Google and how you gonna fight that?

[glitch]

36. I believe you are correct and welcome to DU! nt

[Rich Hunt]

47. certainly

If I were a paranoid reich-winger, I would certainly contemplate using the technology available to
accumulate info and profile potential 'enemies'....

If it's possible for them to do it, some of them will certainly try.

[upi402]

24. google refused to bend over for the BushCo

shame on bushco

[spooked]

32. Conspiracy Theory: BushCo demands Google records, Google agrees

to withhold those records, everyone knowing all the while that it will give a perfect excuse to take profits from Google stock...

[sattahipdeep]

40. Interesting

Last month, Microsoft Corp.'s MSN unit pulled the plug on a Chinese
blogger who discussed politically-sensitive issues. Yahoo has also
shared such data, which led to the conviction and jailing of a journalist,
and Google itself has agreed to make its search results in that country
amenable to surveillance.

"This request (for Google's data) is disturbing because it's the nose
under the camel's tent," Harper said. If we're not careful, control and
censorship of Internet data in this country "could look more like China
than we thought possible," he said.

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story.asp?guid=%7B54C61B89-2A96-4DAD-A844-A9B994AE79C7%7D&siteid=google

[zann725]

37. What is that saying..."What goes up....goes down?" Well it IS...

and well, we all knew it was coming. Don't need ane conomics degree for this one.

I can guarantee you one thing...IF they would've "counted all the votes", and Kerry OR Gore were Prez (as rightfully they should be)...the Market, our Dollar, and this world would NOT be where it's headed right now.

'Nuf said.

[rman]

43. it's not just coming down because it went up

It's coming down because google refused to hand over information on Web searches to the government.
Google is being punished for not playing ball with the neo-nazis.

[TankLV]

42. Maybe if they didn't keep private search records, this wouldn't have

happened.

If they made a policy of NEVER KEEPING search records, a CORRUPT REPUKE government wouldn't be able to ask for them, no?

[oostevo]

44. Don't think that's possible ...

If they created a policy to never store search records, I'd imagine that it would be almost impossible to run their search engine (not to mention the aspects of their company that actually make them money ... like AdWords).

[yellowdogmi]

49. I hate to make recommendations but

I say we all buy into it. They are supporting us. Let us support them. Disclaimer- I have never made money in the stockmarket. This may be bad but sensible advice.

[fshrink]

50. At least there's some spine here.

Which is in shortest supply ever. I switched from Yahoo to Google, after the former handed its records without a word and the latter resisted. On Google's groups, I noticed that more did the opposite... These probably are the "undecided", closet conservatives still ashamed, rightfully I might add, of their secret leaning. With those and the bona fide assholes or idiots, or both, there is a large majority of conservatives in this country. It's a fact. The strategic choice is either to move towards them (e.g. Rodham, Lieberman) or to radicalize (e.g. Boxer, Dean). "Winning" is in fact secondary, which very few people seems to understand. So Google might "lose", it will have made the best choice for the future and will perhaps even win in the end...

[hyphenate]

51. It's called extortion

and our current government is rife with criminals who will stop at nothing, including extortion, to make their point.

[bklyncowgirl]

52. When the markets reopen on Monday---buy Google.

It makes a nice statement and you should make some money on the dea.

[Zynx]

62. Don't play politics with stocks. Ever.