Back on Jan 19th 2006, the DOJ subpoenaed Google to turn over search records in support of their child pornography case they were building. The headlines were horrible: stuff like “Google Sued over Child Porn.” It was a PR mess, and Google stock slipped ~10% to 399.

I felt confident that it was a temporary blip, so I bought some GOOG. It was a whim and probably not an intelligent investment decision considering the risk. Plus, I thought it would be interesting to get all the voting papers for the upcoming annual shareholders meeting. I never bought an individual stock before, so needless to say I was pretty clueless going in (and I still am now).

I figured at the time that the stock would hit 500 in a few months, so I set that as my target price. I was down on myself in March when Google sunk as low as 331, but as many sources reported today: GOOG hit 500 yesterday. It’s my target, so I sold at 509.

Will GOOG go higher? I think it’s likely, but I’m happy with 27% growth over 10 months, so I’m not going to stick around to find out how high it can go.

This chart compares GOOG to the S&P500 from the day I bought to the day I sold:

The main conclusion to draw here is you couldn’t go wrong investing over the time period I did considering the S&P500 performance.

That was fun. Maybe I should take a stock tip from yesterday’s Wallstrip episode for my next purchase: