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“While it may seem that we have come far already, this is just the beginning of a lifetime.” – Sergey Brin
Below is a snippet of commentary from today’s Morning Lineup. Start a two-week trial to Bespoke Premium to view the full report.
Futures are about as flat as they can be this morning, with the S&P 500 indicated to open up by 0.02% while the Nasdaq is down 0.02%. After the weakness to kick off the week, though, bulls will take it. Crude oil prices are slightly higher, but the real action is in treasuries, where the 10-year yield has dropped 6 basis points to 4.64%.
It was a rough night in Asia, as the Nikkei fell more than 3% while South Korea’s Kospi plunged over 5%. In Europe, trading is much quieter as the STOXX 600 is little changed, and the only notable country move is in France, where the CAC 40 is up 0.4%.
In the US today, it’s a quiet session data-wise as there are no economic reports on the calendar, leaving investors to focus on the Fed Minutes at 2 PM.
While it’s not necessarily a birthday for the company, today does mark the 22nd anniversary of Alphabet (GOOGL) trading as a public company. Despite some healthy skepticism toward the stock’s valuation, the stock rallied more than 18% on its first day of trading and was up over 25% within a week. Twenty-two years later, it’s up 16,082% on a price basis. If you had invested $1,000 in the company at its initial offering price, you’d have $160,000 today.
We’ve pointed out in the past that some of the stock market’s biggest winners over time didn’t get to where they are in a straight line. On the contrary, their paths were usually anything but. GOOGL is no exception. Just barely more than four years after it started trading as a public company, GOOGL was in a drawdown of more than 65%. More recently, in November 2022, just around the 2022 bear market lows, the stock was in a drawdown of more than 44%, and then in April 2025, around the tariff tantrum, it was down close to 30%.
Through yesterday’s close, the stock was down 14.5% from its all-time high, which is slightly more than the average of 13.0% for all periods since 2004. GOOGL has had its share of large drawdowns, and it would have been hard to stomach those losses as the stock declined. But when you take a step back and think about it, an average drawdown of 13.0% doesn’t seem all that bad.
As things currently stand, GOOGL’s 14.5% drawdown comes amid questions surrounding the company’s AI strategy. The company has been under a lot of criticism lately as its models have lagged competitors, and when it comes to coding agents, GOOGL doesn’t even have a viable offering. Besides the product portfolio, there has been a barrage of headlines regarding what is being reported as a talent exodus at the company as engineers have been frustrated by bureaucracy and a lack of compute resources to work on new projects.
On the other side of the ledger, the cloud backlog keeps building, the company has the cheapest inference stack in the business through its own silicon, and Gemini holds its own on usage against any competing model. And given its consumer focus, some have argued Alphabet doesn’t need a strong coding agent at all.
In some ways, the headlines would make it seem like the stock should be down more. While the stock is trading just below its now downward-sloping 50-day moving average, it remains above its still upward-sloping 200-day moving average, putting it right in the middle of a declining channel. So, is this another example of the headlines having it wrong, and when GOOGL celebrates its 23rd anniversary next August, will we all have forgotten this moment? Or is the market snoozing while GOOGL cedes control of the AI narrative to competitors despite branding itself an “AI-first” company all the way back in early 2016?
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