I know you guys are pros, but bear with an amatuer for a moment. Take an intraday chart of GOOG. Take and intraday chart of another reasonably active stock. Erase the names and price reference. Shuffle them up reeeeeeaaaalllll good. Bet you cant tell me which is which Duh.
What is this supposed to mean? Without price reference, this comparison is meaningless. You can lose your shirt while trading YHOO but keep it while trading DELL even though the charts may look the same. The prices mean EVERYTHING! A one-minute tick chart looks the same as a 5-minute tick chart looks the same as a daily chart looks the same as a yearly chart etc. for any reasonably active stock (if you erase the names and prices). There's nothing groundbreaking here!
Someone enlighten me on click fraud. Do the web sites where the actual ads run get a share of the click fee? Or does GOOG keep it all and just pay the site a flat fee to run the ads? It seems to me that the $90 million settlement for apparently rampant click fraud was digested by the market as basically business as usual. It strikes me as very serious however, since it calls into question the whole model of pay per click. Comparisons to TV advertising are not analogous, since ads are bought based on historical viewership, at least I think they are, and it would be difficult to rig the Neilson system anyway. The fact that GOOG settled this seems to imply that they were either aware of the fraud or perhaps complicit in it. So that calls their accounting into question and the legitimacy of their SEC filings. Hello, class action lawyers. Suddenly, the most important stock in the market seems to have an awful lot of fleas. The embarrassing performance by their exec's, their complicity in chinese censorship and repression, the web site screwup where they published numbers, then took them down, now this click fraud...what's next?
To paraphrase another saying, the nice thing about class action suits is that there are so many of them. Google said they settled the suit because it was a small price to pay. Presumably they hoped this would end all the click fraud lawsuits. But the lawyers currently suing them in California for the same thing have said that they hope their lawsuit can get class certification before the settlement in the Arkansas suit is approved so that they can make themselves more mone.. er, I mean "protect the interest of the Google customers we represent."
When you are paying per share commission goog, makes sense. When it comes to volatility I think that percentage increase/decreases would be the same percentage wise whether there was a stock split or not.