Topic: Growth Stocks

Google's Stock is About to Get Cheaper—Pat McKeough on YouTube

The more you know about investing, the more successful you will be. That has been Pat McKeough’s approach through four decades as an investor and investment counsellor. He regularly presents his views on specific investment topics—and specific stocks—on video in order to share the insights he has gathered over the years.

Today’s topic is one of the world’s leading tech stocks. In the contest to see which company would become the dominant Internet search engine, Google (symbol GOOG on Nasdaq) was the clear winner. It has built upon that foundation. Four years ago, the company launched its Android operating system for smartphones and tablet computers. This year, it purchased cellphone maker Motorola Mobility.

Now it has announced a key re-organization that will make its richly-priced shares more liquid. We give an explanation of Google’s share initiative followed by Pat’s commentary.

Right now, Google has two share classes: the class A shares, which have one vote each, and the class B shares, which have 10 votes each. Only the class A shares are listed and traded. Google recently created a new class of non-voting shares (Class C) that will trade on Nasdaq. Existing class A and B shareholders will receive one class C share for each share they currently hold, for an effective 2-for-1 stock split.

Besides the better liquidity, the lower stock price should attract investors who have stayed away because the shares seemed too expensive (currently above $688). As well, the company can issue class C shares as compensation for future acquisitions without diluting current shareholders’ voting power. Google aims to hand out the class C shares later this year.

Pat concludes with his assessment of how Google’s share plan is likely to unfold, and of its future prospects.

The transcription of his YouTube talk is below.

Pat McKeough: Google’s doing an interesting re-organization that will really amount to a 2-for-1 stock split. Except that the additional stock you get will be non-voting instead of subordinated voting.

I think that’s a good thing because companies usually do stock splits, or something similar, when they want to call attention to themselves and they want people to look more closely to see what value is there.

You’ll often find, though, that a stock will rise on the announcement of the stock split and then not much will happen after that that would not have happened anyway.

Going back to Google, I like Google, and I’ve liked it for some time. I think it’s a buy. And it’s not a bad thing to see this re-organization taking place which is equivalent to a stock split. It tells me that Google is still coming along nicely. You can see that Google is in the early days of what will be years or decades of long-term growth—and I like it.

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On YouTube: At half the price, will Google’s shares be twice the value? [Tweet this]

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