Insiders still own 30% of the stock plus a potential 20% in $0 stock options they have to right to buy right now.
Well, you should try to get a lot of negative delta and as few negative theta as possible. Theta basically is the time decay, what you lose every day just in case of standstill. If you put up an option chain in IB you can compare price, delta and theta very well. To make it short, a put slightly in the money, but definitely not a november one seems to be nice. If you want to reduce risk, you buy a put out of the money, but you have to pay a much higher price in terms of theta for. Always assume that you might not find a customer for your option and you have to wait until expiry. How much money do you get at which price at expiry and how much time is there to actually reach that price? That is what you have to answer yourself...
do not short a stock just because its high. goog is a good company as well. What makes you think earnings will go down? don't think, react. theres nothing to react to now.
I would not short it unless I get a bearish signal of course. on the other hand please define "good company"... 86 times earnings is a little rich, ain't it? I am a customer of their ad program and Internet advertising does not work or shall I say it is a super expensive proposition. Self clicking web-advertisers make Google's adworks a borderline fraud and a sham, I would short the Co. based on some technical top and bad news combined with some accounting tizzy....or a big lawsuit (most likely) Anything is possible....
Someone brought up their auditors, and I think it's an interesting point. When my old company signed up for google adwords they continued to charge us even when we thought we had shut our keywords off. We were convinced that we had terminated our relationship with them, but every day like clockwork, we would get another bill. Eventually I believe we contacted google and told our credit card company to shut off our billing. Maybe we did something wrong, but I don't think so.
Google's internal controls and forecasting are not particularly sophisticated. The rumor in the valley is that last quarter's results pretty much came as a suprise them. They had no idea they were making so much money until they ran the numbers after quarter end. One day the suprise might not be on the upside. Martin
Shorting any strong stock at the top is stupid. The best time to short is after it sell off 20 to 30% from it's high. Btw, I made money every time I short GOOG, that's when it was in the 200, and 300.
GOOG already showed a reversal doji star a few days ago. Also friday's move was the 2nd out of 3 day bearish signal. If on Monday GOOG forms a evening star formation, then i would short. 2 bearish signals in a row is bad news.