Subject: Re: AAPL PE when WEB was buying
They're primarily an advertising company. And with a recession coming, advertising will slow. Furthermore, I just saw a stat that AI "search" has just passed google search. Now Google has an AI too, but so do so many others. So that can't be good for google. That's a tailwind to me.

(I presume you meant headwind=bad, not tailwind=good)

Sure there will be a cyclical downturn if the economy has one. Almost all businesses are cyclical to some extent or other, but that doesn't mean their values go away. Almost all of the value of any stock is founded on its business results more than a decade in the future. A farm isn't worthless just because winter is coming (unless it's near Winterfell).

Real risks to the future of the business are a more serious topic. Some folks foresee LLM based search supplanting keyword search entirely, and Alphabet having no share of the LLM based search market, hitting 2/3 of their business hard. I think the impact will be primarily a hit to margins, as I don't expect keyword to disappear and I don't expect Alphabet's LLM search efforts to be in vain. Opinions differ, which is fine.

I believe real earnings per share will be materially higher in a few years, and that current multiples seem very fair in relation to the value and the resilience of the earnings streams.

Fun experiment: Youtube is bigger than Netflix, much more profitable, and growing at least as fast. What would it be worth at the multiples that Netflix is getting? Estimates of net margin are around 38%, revenues over $40bn this year, Netflix multiple is 47, so around 3/4 of a trillion? (note, I'm not saying it's really worth that much, just that that's what it might be trading at)
Continuing the what-if, that's a little under 40% of Alphabet's current market cap. What is the implied multiple on the rest of the earnings? Something like 12.5 I think. These days that counts as dead end cash cow territory, not how I would describe search and cloud.

No company is perfect, as every frog has a wart. My main point is that I think this particular frog seems pretty reasonably priced, if you're in the market for any kind of frog at all.

Jim