The Gong Show

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: