Investors could be partying like it’s 1999 again if GOOG manages to clamber over the $400 per share barrier, hitting a price that even the height of the dot-com era would have seen as excessive.
It’s not what you would pay, but what someone else is willing to pay, that drives stock prices. Wall Street has been a case study in opposites for ages, rewarding companies that slash jobs while punishing those with good financial reports, as Yahoo and Apple have seen recently.
Right now, Google has surged since its secondary stock offering in September. Today’s stock market open saw the price of GOOG at $392.12, and has risen to $393.47. After a slight dip following the September stock offer, the price rose steadily through October, then began a sharp climb.
The stock came close last week to breaking $400 per share, reaching a high of $397.47 before retreating through Thursday. Now it’s begun the upward move again.
Is Google a bubble waiting to deflate? We agreed with the Wall Street Journal that it looked that way. But when Google announced incredible earnings for the third quarter, GOOG took off for the top.
It shows no sign of slowing down yet, either. If there is a bubble, investors seem confident it will stay intact. One way Google could keep it that way will be when its classifieds service officially launches.
That would give the company a lot more opportunities to present its contextual advertising, the source of its revenue and resulting market capitalization as valued by the stock market. One analyst has GOOG rated as a “buy” with a target of $430 per share. The target doesn’t look so unlikely now.
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
