Erik Baker
Ms. Frank
Economics B2
December 6 2014
Stock Market Research Paper
The stock that I have kept for the whole five weeks of the stock market project was
Google. During the five weeks that I had Google as a stock Google ended up losing me money, but overall the stock did great. The stock had its ups and downs, but most of the time ups. In this research report I will go through the background and history of the company and try to explain why the stock either did good or bad. The history and background of the company is important to the company. The founders of the company are Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Larry Page remained the CEO of the Google company till 2001 and then became the CEO of the company in 2011.
Founders Larry Page and
Sergey Brin met at Stanford University in 1995. By 1996, they had built a search engine, which was initially called BackRub, “used links to determine the importance of individual webpages”
(Google company 1). Larry and Sergey named the search engine they “built “Google,” a play on the word “googol,” the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros” (Google company 2).
Google was created in 1998 and soon became a big hit. The first special Google drawing was in
1998 and was intended to let visitors on the homepage know that Google’s minders were offline at the Burning Man Festival in Nevada. Now there is a team of what they call “doodlers” who have posted more than 2,000 different doodles that have been on the website homepage. The biggest event in Google’s timeline for me was their decision to go public. The “Initial Public
Baker 2
Offering was of 19,605,052 shares of Class A common stock which took place on Wall Street on August 18, 2004” (Google Company 6). This is the background to the company and on that day people like me could buy stocks and that is where the research in the ups and downs of the stock during the five weeks begins.
Google was the one of my three stocks that I did not change because I heard that Google was expected to make the most money in the last quarter of the year. Google’s stock was seeming to live up to that expectation, but in the last week of the five weeks, Google stocks crashed causing the price of the stock to go below the price that i bought it at. This dramatic drop in the buying price caused me to lose lots of money because the selling price was way below the price I bought the stock at. The drop in price correlates to Google announcing the addition of the new class C shares to the already in place class A shares. The difference between class C shares and class A shares is that “class C shares have no voting rights” and class A shares have voting rights (Rodriguez 1). The class A shares will be sold under the name GOOGL and the class C shares will be under the name GOOG. This change in adding class C shares will make it feel like
“you’re going to own twice as