We recently published a list of Billionaire Ken Fisher’s 10 Favorite AI Stocks for the Rest of 2024. Since Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) ranks 4th on the list, it deserves a deeper look.
Billionaire Ken Fisher regularly shares his investing wisdom on his YouTube channel, sharing market insights and lessons he’s learned over the decades. Commenting about the Fed’s rate cut, Fisher recently advised investors not to focus on what the central bank is doing and instead pay attention to long-term investing.
“The fact is, and I’ve said this for a long time, I won’t live forever, but I hope to live a long time and keep saying it: central bankers are crazy. Throughout my life, central banks have operated on flawed ideas and groupthink, which is an inefficient way to manage markets.”
Fisher gave an example of how you could end up losing money following the herd mentality when it comes to central bank moves.
“If you had followed the common belief that when the Fed and other central banks hike rates, you should get out of stocks, that would have worked for a couple of months in 2022. By the middle of the summer of 2022, during the height of rate hikes, you would have been on the wrong side of the market. From June 2022 onward, as the Fed hiked rates by 75 basis points nearly every month, the market was just a few months away from rising, leading to the bull market we’re in now, in 2024.
The basic belief that central bank hikes are bad for stocks was wrong from the start because it was already priced in. As soon as central bank hikes were visible, the market had already accounted for them. We saw a bull market begin in October 2022, which has continued despite repeated rate hikes.”
For this article, we scanned Ken Fisher’s hedge fund’s Q2 holdings and picked its top AI investments. We have analyzed the AI-related growth catalysts for each stock. Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter’s strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 275% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 150 percentage points (see more details here).
A user’s hands typing a search query into a Google Search box, emphasizing the company’s search capabilities.
Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG)
Billionaire Ken Fisher’s Stake: $8,856,226,893
Despite constant alarms going off about its search business, Alphabet Inc Class C (NASDAQ:GOOG) search revenue jumped about 13.7% in the second quarter year over year. As of the end of June, Google has about 91.06% share of the search engine market, just 1.65% lower than the December 2019 levels. With AI overviews and other search initiatives, Alphabet Inc Class C (NASDAQ:GOOG) will be able to stave off any competitors given its dominance in the market. According to StatCounter report, Bing search engine’s market share only increased from 3.03% in August 2023 to 3.91% in August 2024. This shows MSFT has not been able to make any notable dent in Google’s market share.
Cloud and YouTube are two key strong catalysts for Alphabet Inc Class C (NASDAQ:GOOG) shares. During the second quarter, Alphabet’s Cloud revenue rose 28.8% to $10.35 billion, crushing past analysts’ forecasts of $10.16 billion. Alphabet Inc Class C (NASDAQ:GOOG) is on the path to reach a $100 billion revenue run-rate from YouTube Ads and Google Cloud by the end of 2024.
Pershing Square Holdings stated the following regarding Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) in its Q2 2024 investor letter:
“Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG), the parent company of Google, delivered stellar business results in the first half of 2024. Revenues grew 14% powered by Google’s dominant position in the fast-growing digital advertising market as well as certain company-specific tailwinds including the increasing adoption of AI automation tools by advertisers and YouTube’s continued success in the Connected TV Medium. Strong revenue growth coupled with cost control initiatives and stable staffing levels (headcount has remained flat year-to-date), resulted in strong operating leverage. Operating profit margins expanded approximately 340 basis points, excluding one-time severance and real estate charges. In the second quarter, the company’s Cloud segment outpaced its major competitors with 29% revenue growth and achieved 11% profit margins, after first reaching profitability just 18 months ago.
Amidst solid financial performance, Google is achieving notable milestones in its AI product development roadmap. At its annual developer conference in early May, the company unveiled the broad rollout of “AI Overviews”, which are AI-powered summary responses for certain types of queries. Early results from AI Overviews highlight how thoughtful integration of AI into Search not only improves the user experience, leading to more frequent and detailed queries, but also creates opportunities for greater ad monetization through context-rich responses and higher conversion rates…” (Click here to read the full text)
Overall, Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) ranks 4th on Insider Monkey’s list titled Billionaire Ken Fisher’s 10 Favorite AI Stocks for the Rest of 2024. While we acknowledge the potential of Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG), our conviction lies in the belief that AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns, and doing so within a shorter timeframe. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than GOOG but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.
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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
