Double Journey

Google Closed yesterday at $486.44.  This represents a 4% drop from the previous close.  This despite the fact that the rest of the market saw a strong day with an up 1% day on the Nasdaq and a 1.5% up day on the Dow.

I’ve actually been looking for an in to Google stock since it originally broke and stayed above the $500 barrier in Jun of 2007.  It broke it a few times before that but could not sustain itself.  in August of 2007, it took a brief dip below $500 but recovered soon thereafter.

Now it has gone under $500, and I believe that will be a strong resistance point from now on.  If it can rally in the next few days and find a way above it, then perhaps it will stay there, but in all likelihood it will stay below.  It is never good when a stock like this, which has been a leader for so long, goes in a tailspin down.  Part of it up until now could be blamed on the overall market.  But when the market turns, and a stock like this doesn’t turn with it, you have to be concerned.

I don’t think it has much to go down from here, but I still don’t think its a buy.  Long term, I believe Google is probably a good buy,especially at a 30P/E.  Short term, $450 is possible, and perhaps lower.

The market has been quite turbulent. I myself have decided to walk away from it and not pay too much attention. Even in my regular portfolio, I’m not that heavily invested in stocks, so I can afford to not worry too much. That being said, with the wild swings of the market as of late, I have seen one day drops in my portfolio in the $1000 range which makes me nervous.

However, when things look bleak, it is time to start looking to buy things. You can essentially think of the market as going on sale, and don’t we all like a good sale? Like my man Warren Buffet says, “Unless you can watch your stock holding decline by 50% without becoming panic-stricken, you should not be in the stock market”. Given this bit of advice, this little 10% drop or so at the beginning of the year is nothing. I’m in fact somewhat excited by it because I really want to buy into some good stocks.

That being said, wait a few more percentage points down. The perfect case study in this is Google. Google is down to about $500 from a high of $740. This stock is in no mans land at this point. I would not be a buyer of it, but I also might not be a seller of it. Google has good long term prospects, but right now the stock is getting beat up along with the rest of tech. Is this panic selling? Absolutely! But if you can’t stand to watch the stock drop another $100, you shouldn’t be in it. It can easily go down another $100 because it is so tied to online advertising, and in a recession, which everyone is predicting, advertising is one of the things businesses cut back on first.

If however, you can buy the stock and ignore it, than this would be an excellent time to consider buying into it. It is all about the type of person you are. Long term investors want to seriously start looking at the market, and trying to pick some stocks up that you have wanted for a while. All others who let their emotions ride the roller coaster along with their stocks are best to avoid the market until things start leveling out.

And I would sell.  Now full disclosure time.  I own Microsoft stock, stock I received while employed there.  Microsoft came out and beat their estimates.  More importantly, they gave good guidance as opposed to Apple who came out with good earnings and less than optimistic outlooks.

While I’m going to hold on to Microsoft (I rarely make moves in my long term portfolio) my recommendation is to sell.  You see, I have VERY little faith in this company long term.  They are losing talent left and right.   Most of the top developers I worked with have already left the company or are planning to leave.  Most of them are heading over to Google.

Companies like Microsoft are very dependent on their talent and the talent just isn’t going to Microsoft anymore.  Those that are still behind are quickly seeing that there are better opportunities elsewhere.  I still have to make my post about why I left Microsoft.  I’ll follow up with that one shortly.

I have another website that actually gets more traffic than this one. I’ve had the site for several years, and it receives quite a few hits a day from search engines for various topics. Just recently, I started updating that blog much more regularly, daily instead of once or twice a month, and for some reason the traffic to my site is up a lot more.

Now I could understand this if people were searching and finding my site through new topics I’m talking about, but that’s not the case. My site gets 90% of its traffic from about 3 or 4 search terms and its still getting that from the same search terms. Either there has been a significant increase in interest for these 3 or 4 topics, or Google must be weighting these terms higher because I’m providing more recent content on totally unrelated topics. That’s the only thing I can think of, but if someone smarter than me knows what else might be going on, I would love to hear about it.

*Note - I’m somewhere on I-5 on my way from Seattle to L.A.  This post is being blogged via Wordpress’ delay post feature.  Be back next week with my thoughts on starting a new job!

In a relatively short amount of time, I’ve become very high on the search “Save the Kitty” in Google. This of course refers to my earlier post about how donating to my site could actually save my kitty’s life. Well just to show you how bad things have gotten I present you with these two pictures.

This looks like a seemingly normal pile of large wrapping paper. But take a look inside

My poor cat has resorted to living in this paper bag because you refused to donate money to help him! It is the only shelter he can find from this brutal Seattle rain. Why won’t you help this kitty? Why do you want to hurt this kitty? Donate now and you can help help put a real roof over his head.

*Note - I’m somewhere on I-5 on my way from Seattle to L.A. This post and tomorrow’s are being blogged via Wordpress’ delay post feature. Be back next week with my thoughts on starting a new job!

As I was looking around my Adsense site, I noticed that there was now an option for a video option courtesy of YouTube. I have thus far only done a small adsense section in the lower right corner of my blog, but was curious to see what the Adsense/YouTube add would actually look like. So I'm putting the code here to see what it looks like. I'll post it up for a while, and share my thoughts on it after I see how it really works.

Update: Finally got this to work, but had to do a few things to make sure Javascript works in a Wordpress Post. It was surprisingly hard to figure out how to do this. So if anyone else wants to figure out how to make an adsense Video script work in wordpress you just have to do the following

1. Read this about Javascript and Wordpress. Specifically the section about Javascript in Post.
2. Download and install the text control plugin.
3. Set it so that the post is not formatted
4. Plugin the Script that YouTube gives you. Use the "code" section of the post.
5. Do not re-save the work as soon as you paste the code. Wordpress formats this for some reason, breaking the post.

Not a huge fan of this. Not sure how one would use it to integrate it into your site. Am I supposed to have a big section to the side to host this video? I also can't control the content on it at all so how do I know my readers would be interested in it? It's kind of big and obtrusive, unlike traditional adsense ads and the adsense area is kind of small in comparison to the video so not sure how well it will be as an advertising section. I don't see how I would use it on my site, but I'll search around and see if I can find anyone who actually does something creative or useful with this new ad format.

Today I had lunch at what anyone with a website would consider Mecca. More appropriately, it would have to be called Mecca Northwest, since I didn’t actually make it down to Mountain View. I didn’t go there to learn any secrets, or to find a job, but rather to have lunch with a friend. This was the “friend” who convinced me that it was a good idea to come up to Seattle. The last few weeks, with the biting cold we have been experiencing, I’ve been evaluating the wisdom of this decision. More about that later.

Google seems like a pretty good place to work. Food everywhere, no doubt I would gain weight if I worked there. They even had a massage chair, which almost convinced me to hand over my resume. Too bad they don’t have a place for a Microsoft Program Manager (than again who does? It’s a job that seems to only exist at Microsoft).

I always enjoy talking to this friend. Whenever we talk, I walk away having learned something or having something to think about. Today, we discussed this site a little bit, but mostly in the context of trying to do something outside of work. It’s obviously something I think about a lot, thus the reason for this site. I realize that it would certainly be possible to get rich doing what I do for my day job, but I’m not sure it would happen as fast as I would like or be as fun as building up something on my own. He of course commented that he would never do what I was doing (I didn’t think I would either) it was certainly good that I was doing something.

Of course, I don’t want to do this strictly through trading, but it is where I’m starting for now. If I can somehow make money in some other capacity, whether it being developing a widget or selling lemonade on the side of the road, I’m certainly open to do it. I’m just not sure how successful I will be selling lemonade on the side of the road in Seattle when it is 30 degrees outside.