Google’s Stock No Longer A Superstar

Kevin Kelleher at GigaOm writes about the fact that Google stock has stalled, with drastically less growth every year since its IPO. Here’s a chart showing the rise of each year since Google went public in 2004 (2004 and 2007 are partial years, obviously):

Here’s a look at the individual charts for each year:
Google stock by year through April 2007 Hosted on Zooomr
So, why is Google stock no longer a good buy? Kevin says it is because Google keeps offering new shares, devaluing the ones it has. Google’s IPO issued 19.6 million shares in August 2004, then they issued a secondary offering of 14.2 million shares in September 2005 (a lot of which probably paid for the AOL deal) and another 3.2 million shares issued in November 2006 to pay for YouTube.
Currently, there are 37 million shares of Google, valued at $474.27 each, comprising $17,547,990,000 of shareholder […]

Original post by Nathan Weinberg