Investing megathread extravaganza

[DaFace]

A place to talk about investing stuff.

[Buehler445]

Originally Posted by ChiliConCarnage

You better hope those investors don't hear that the government has won a couple of lawsuits against Google to break it up.


I agree with the person that Youtube is compelling. I think it'd sell at a big premium if it was spun off. I don't know how that'd work though exactly. All of the money is ads. Whether it's search, gmail/docs, chrome, youtube, android. They mostly all just keep you in the ecosystem and give them more data to build better profiles for advertisers. If you separate out the busineses then they each have less valuable info about their users.

Historically, breakups have increased shareholder value. Standard Oil made Rockefeller the richest MFer to ever live. Bell Telephone spun off and the parts were greater than the whole. Recently the GE spinoff made real gains (although that one wasn't forced).

You're right about breaking up the infrastructure. They could lose some ad efficiency. But the YouTube portion of it makes so much money, that as a shareholder, if they want to spin that off, I want my shares.

Plus I think Waymo could be the part of this nobody is talking about. They're literally the ONLY operating robotaxi. ANd that's what is supposed to be Tesla's big thing that is a million miles from implmentation. That and AI which is further.

So I'm still bullish Google.

EDIT: I’m still bullish on googles revenue growth. Obviously larger market forces can wash out positive performance of a company. I’m bullish as a buy and hold investor not a short or even intermediate term trader.

Spoiled for DC - Don't shitcan me to that ****ing place. Please?

Spoiler!

Plus I'm fairly certain Trump made promises LOL Who knows how that will shake out. Supposedly Trump told the DOJ to kill it, they met and Trump got convinced to let it ride. Who knows.

[Buehler445]

Originally Posted by Rain Man

Like most people, I've got a lot of weighting in those big search and social media companies like Google and Amazon and Facebook. But I keep waiting for the day that advertisers will figure out the actual ROI on those garbage ads that pop up everywhere and just stop paying for them. I don't think I've ever made it through an entire YouTube ad. I just wait for the skip button to show up and click it and never even know what the ad's about.

Supposedly Meta and Facebook ads are supposed to be the most effective. The return on adspend is supposedly WAY higher than traditional media. I hate them so much that I paid for premium YouTube and never get on that shit****disastermess Facebook. But supposedly they're very effective.

[Rain Man]

I'm making all of those cartoon symbols for cursing this morning. I have a fair amount of money in CODI, which is a holding company. One of their nine companies is being investigated for accounting irregularities, and the stock is down 58 percent today. This is likely my biggest single-day proportional disaster ever.

It feels like a huge overreaction. The company in question appears to be about 10% of CODI's portfolio, so a 58% decline in the stock seems extreme. Unless it's major fraud, that one company can't be 58 percent of profit and growth.

[Nirvana58]

Originally Posted by Buehler445

Supposedly Meta and Facebook ads are supposed to be the most effective. The return on adspend is supposedly WAY higher than traditional media. I hate them so much that I paid for premium YouTube and never get on that shit****disastermess Facebook. But supposedly they're very effective.

You know how much crap my wife has bought because of a stupid Facebook advertisement.

[ChiliConCarnage]

Originally Posted by Buehler445

Supposedly Meta and Facebook ads are supposed to be the most effective. The return on adspend is supposedly WAY higher than traditional media.

Yeah, easier to target for small biz too. Amazon is very easy to see how their advertising is so wanted. You open the app, type 4 person tent and they put whoever pays at the top as recommended. Very direct.

I struggle with how Marketing works sometimes. How is it worth Coke or Pepsi spending 5 million per Super Bowl ad. Who switches? lol. The kind of advertising Amazon does makes a lot of sense though and it's easy to see how valuable that can be.

[myselff77]

Originally Posted by Rain Man

It feels like a huge overreaction. The company in question appears to be about 10% of CODI's portfolio, so a 58% decline in the stock seems extreme. Unless it's major fraud, that one company can't be 58 percent of profit and growth.

Ouch. Before today, what did you like about Codi? Dividend play?

[Rain Man]

Originally Posted by myselff77

Ouch. Before today, what did you like about Codi? Dividend play?

I've had it for 20 years probably. It would grind up a couple percent per year and pay a five percent dividend with no surprises, so overall I'd get a good return. It seemed like a good base foundation stock in the portfolio.

This was a surprise. However, I'm looking at recent trends, and I think some insider information was afoot. It had dropped 25 percent this year before today. I hadn't noticed that. I probably wouldn't have done anything if I had noticed, though.

I went out and looked at some stock sites and most anonymous internet people say there was a huge overreaction, which was my first observation. One anonymous internet person, though, said that the holding being audited contributed 40 percent of their EBITDA, and with the debt they have, that could put the whole company under if they now can't cover debt. That would be a nasty hit for me.

[Buehler445]

Originally Posted by Rain Man

I've had it for 20 years probably. It would grind up a couple percent per year and pay a five percent dividend with no surprises, so overall I'd get a good return. It seemed like a good base foundation stock in the portfolio.

This was a surprise. However, I'm looking at recent trends, and I think some insider information was afoot. It had dropped 25 percent this year before today. I hadn't noticed that. I probably wouldn't have done anything if I had noticed, though.

I went out and looked at some stock sites and most anonymous internet people say there was a huge overreaction, which was my first observation. One anonymous internet person, though, said that the holding being audited contributed 40 percent of their EBITDA, and with the debt they have, that could put the whole company under if they now can't cover debt. That would be a nasty hit for me.

It could compound too. If they determine it's an oversight problem, they could audit the rest of the businesses in the holding company.

[Rain Man]

Originally Posted by Buehler445

It could compound too. If they determine it's an oversight problem, they could audit the rest of the businesses in the holding company.

You're not making me feel better!

[DaFace]

Originally Posted by ChiliConCarnage

Yeah, easier to target for small biz too. Amazon is very easy to see how their advertising is so wanted. You open the app, type 4 person tent and they put whoever pays at the top as recommended. Very direct.

I struggle with how Marketing works sometimes. How is it worth Coke or Pepsi spending 5 million per Super Bowl ad. Who switches? lol. The kind of advertising Amazon does makes a lot of sense though and it's easy to see how valuable that can be.

There's a little bit of fuzzy math involved, but it's possible to loosely quantify the results of stuff like that (look up market mix modeling if you're curious). Places like Nielsen have data on daily sales of all sorts of stuff that they pull directly from retail POS data, so you can look at when the ad hit and then look for a bump in sales plus a typical tail for how long the effect lasts. It's all based on super dense multiple regression models, but it can get you in the ballpark of reality.

You can also just do some simple math to figure out how much it would take for an ad like that to pay off. Let's make the math easy and say that they make $1 for every Coke purchase made as a result of the ad. That means 5 million purchases, and 127 million people watched the Super Bowl this year. That's only 4%, and the numbers get even easier to justify when you consider that some people buy 24-packs, some make repeat purchases, and some effects last a long time.

[Buehler445]

Originally Posted by Rain Man

You're not making me feel better!

I'm shocked it got wrecked that badly. I had some ADM stock and they had some accounting problems and they didn't crush it nearly like that. At least I don't think so. I dumped it.