Alphabet’s run is nowhere near tapped out, two market analysts told CNBC’s “Trading Nation.”
Shares of the Google parent were marginally higher on Friday, a day after CEO Sundar Pichai participated in a lengthy congressional hearing on misinformation alongside the CEOs of Facebook and Twitter.
In the hearing, Pichai testified that Alphabet aims “to have transparent policies and enforce them without regard to politics or point of view,” and that its “ability to provide a range of information and viewpoints while also being able to remove misinformation is possibly only because of legal frameworks like Section 230,” which protects platforms from liability for users’ posts and leaves content moderation up to them.
Also on Thursday, Morgan Stanley upped its price target on the stock to $2,350, which implies 15% upside from Friday morning’s $2,036 and would mark a new all-time high.
Alphabet’s technical chart seems to support further upside, Newton Advisors founder and President Mark Newton told CNBC on Thursday.
“I like Alphabet as being the preeminent stock in the FANG group and one to still favor for the weeks and the months to come,” Newton said, referring to the popular acronym used for Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google’s parent Alphabet.
“It’s tough to find much fault with the stock,” he said. “It’s been in a very linear uptrend and still shows hardly any deterioration despite all these outflows out of technology in the past couple months, so, it’s held up remarkably well.”
Despite some possible near-term pressure from regulatory crackdowns, Newton expects Alphabet to breach its early February all-time highs in due time.
That move “should cause it to accelerate and get up toward $2,300 into the middle of April,” he said.
“Technology is going to come under increasing pressure from both the left and the right in the months to come,” Newton said. “If Google gets under right near $1,770, it’s a buy. I would use any kind of weakness to still own the name and think it moves higher.”
Alphabet found another fan in Nancy Tengler, chief investment officer of Laffer Tengler Investments.
Not only has search activity returned to pre-Covid levels, with 10-15% of paid searches now related to travel, but earnings, sales and free cash flow are all expected to grow between 19-24%, Tengler said.
“That gives the company a lot of levers to pull in terms of stock buybacks and … maybe one day, let’s hope, the dividend,” Tengler said.
“On our valuation work, which is relevant price-to-sales ratio, the stock is attractive. The fundamentals are improving. The cloud business is growing,” she said.
“We own it and we like it a lot. Some of this is reflected in the price — it’s up 82% on a trailing one-year basis — so, we’re hedging our FANG pick with Google and with Amazon, which has done nothing for the last six months.”
Investors should also be “mindful” of Alphabet’s run-ins with Congress, Tengler said.
“It’s difficult for me to see how Congress is going to solve this problem,” she said. “Each company is different. Their response to the hearing and the testimony is very different. I think you watch and you stay mindful, but we’ve already seen a preview in Europe and this company has plenty of cash to solve these potential problems.”
Disclosure: Tengler and Laffer Tengler Investments own shares of Alphabet and Amazon.
