Don’t look now, but Alphabet’s (NASDAQ:GOOG,NASDAQ:GOOGL) shares are nearing 52-week highs. That’s good news for owners of GOOG stock and technology stocks in general. Tech stocks could be back in the saddle.
GOOG’s shares are trading within 3% of their 52-week high of $142.38. In the past year, its shares are up nearly 40% and 154% over the past 60 months. That’s almost 3x better than the S&P 500 and 42 percentage points higher than the Nasdaq 100.
What’s especially nice to see if you’ve opted for GOOG over Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) stock is that Alphabet is running away from the maker of iPhones as we travel through the year’s final quarter.
While I like Apple and think it should be in every investor’s long-term portfolio, Alphabet should be alongside it.
The Technicals Suggest GOOG Will Keep Moving Higher
I’m no technical analyst, but the fact that Alphabet’s relative strength index (RSI) has dramatically improved in October — it was 44 at the end of September, and now it’s 66, about 50% higher — tells me almost ready to crash through its 2021 highs around $150.
A company’s RSI ranges between 0 and 100. However, most investors consider anything over 70 to be overvalued and anything under 30 to be overvalued. As a result, some would say GOOG stock is getting close to overvalued territory.
However, if you follow Investor’s Business Daily’s thoughts on relative strength — it takes a stock’s performance over the past 52 weeks and compares it to all other stocks to develop a rating for that stock — you might not feel as bad because in mid-July its IBD RS rating went over 80.
“History reveals that the stocks that go on to make the biggest gains tend to have an RS Rating north of 80 in the early stages of their moves,” IBD wrote on July 14.
Since mid-July and IBD’s article, GOOG stock is up more than 10%. More could be just around the corner.
Analysts Sure Don’t Have a Problem With GOOG
Of the 54 analysts that cover Alphabet’s stock, 45 rated Overweight or an outright Buy, with a $150.92 target price — 10% higher than where it’s currently trading.
When Alphabet reported strong Q2 2023 results at the end of July — $21.8 billion in operating income, 12% higher than last year — Needham analysts had three reasons to be optimistic about the company’s stock:
- First, co-founder Sergey Brin is back at the company working on generative AI. That is always a good thing, but especially so because it’s such an essential part of the future of technology.
- Secondly, the Q2 2023 conference call was held at the company’s Deep Mind AI offices in London, a sign it is taking generative AI seriously.
- Lastly, most of the company’s comments in the conference call were about generative AI.
If the Needham analysts were worried about OpenAI’s effect on Alphabet, they had a funny way of showing it, raising their price target by $25 to $140.
YouTube’s a Goldmine
YouTube’s ad revenue in Q2 was $7.7 billion, 4% higher than Q2 2022 and 15% higher than Q1 2023. That’s important because it reverses three consecutive quarters of slowing growth, demonstrating that YouTube’s ad revenue model isn’t broken.
New YouTube CEO Neal Mohan, who took on the role in March, said in July that he plans to continue to improve the platform’s monetization tools and grow the YouTube creator communities. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai also noted that YouTube Shorts are viewed by two billion logged-in users each month, 33% higher than a year ago.
Considering the company only started ads on YouTube Shorts late in 2022, the future revenue stream from this segment of YouTube looks very promising.
On the date of publication, Will Ashworth did not have (either directly or indirectly) any positions in the securities mentioned in this article. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer, subject to the InvestorPlace.com Publishing Guidelines.