I have to agree with that but the day will come when the time is right to short Google. Fridays fall was in line with the market which had a down day.....and to put it into perspective it was similar to wednesdays rise. Tradefor has nailed it in his post......personally I don't consider the stock to be worth trading, it's out of our league, the risk/reward ratio just isn't worth it. Their is a distinction between trading and gambling, and playing with GOOG would be gambling. With the wide swings that Google has who can afford to watch it go up or down 700 ticks in one session. If you want to short it watch the 200 day moving average, all the fund managers use that, short it when it falls through and then use that as your stop. All that said it wouldn't be a bad idea to buy 50/100 shares for the grandkids, you could do a lot worse, but wait untul it drops back to the support levels, $230 + $180.
Well there you have it, GOOG closed at 290.94 up $10.68 for the day.....and about $3.00 off it's high for the day. Moms and Dads and even most professional traders can't handle volitility like that, and to do it properly the brokerage would kill you.
Lot's of sensible advice. The one time that there may be a short opportunity for webmaster is when we actually know that s critical element - likely not page rank - is broken. Outages, persistent bizarre search results or, and this may be the canary in the shaft, when it becomes evident that Google's ad sales are lagging. As webmaster we might have information there which would not be generally available and which would suggest a coming fall in the stock price. Out of interest, is GOOG optionable. One way of constructing a psuedo short position is to buy the stock and sell a call a few month out at a price which you think the shares will not reach. If they hit that point you will lose your position at a profit and have the option premium; if the shares fall that option premium cushions the blow somewhat. The beauty of the strategy being that you can do it several times on the way up and several more on the way back down. (Of course there is the little matter of having the money to buy the shares you are going to write the calls on 100x$300...Ah, yes, 30K plus brokerage.
Yup, GOOG is Optionable, and the Options trade quite actively. This might be a better way to go than an outright Short Sale; provided you (generic "you") are very familiar with how Options work, and very comfortable with the various Options strategies employed. The universal cliche is that Options buyers loose money (on the average), whilest Option writers (Sellers) make money, again on the average. The problem for a writer of GOOG Options is that the stock hasn't been trading long enough to establish a "normal" range for the Option's Implied Volatility - which is the critical variable within Option pricing models. The annualized 30-day Implied Volatility for an at the money Call is about 38% today - which is up sharply from the begining of the month but nowhere near as expensive as the options have been in the past. Maybe it is Fund Managers who want to own the stock going into the Quarter-end, protecting their positions with Options, in case everyone rushes for the exit at once on July1st.?? Options volumes have certainly picked up lately. I don't have a position one way or the other in GOOG and I won't be taking one, as I don't have a good "feel" for the stock. I am, however, expending way too much time and too many braincells on thinking about how to package up an Option writing program and marketing it to webmasters who want to hedge their Google-dependent earnings!! BTW, a sythetic Short is ususally Long Put + Short Call. - way too complicated for me, I think I'll just stick to Peruvian banks, and learning what CSS means.
Love him or hate him, here is what CNBC's Jim Cramer said last night about G http://www.pfblog.com/reasoned/2572_jim_cramers_mad_money_june_6_2005.shtml