GOOGL is a hold; valuation is reasonable (25x forward PE) and business growth remains strong despite AI competitive concerns.

We have some big questions around Google. They haven't done much this year.

In rank number one today overall, it's Google. Now, Meta did jump up above Google for a couple days, but Meta's it's going down. Meta went down like 4% today and a couple percent uh the last market day.

So Meta has given up about $8,000 in gains, bumping itself down, but you can see how close these are. And with Google, I'm up $18,000 and a lot of these gains have been made in just the past couple of years.

When I look at Google, there's a a couple things that are concerning right now. And the biggest concern is that they've basically fallen behind in the AI model race. Google was in the lead in 2026.

In fact, at the beginning of the year, Google had the best model, which was Gemini 3.5 Pro. It was excellent. Did a great job for the time. But then, OpenAI released a couple new models.

They released recently Astra, which is incredible. And you have Claude just releasing new ones as well, which are incredible. I know these models very well. I'm always one of the top 1% users in these different tools.

And so, I understand the difference in capability between the two. And simply put, CatchBT is just way better, way better than Google today. ChatBT is so much better than Gemini.

They're not really that close today. So, we've had seven, eight months now of Google just going nowhere. No new pro model released. They've released a couple light models which are fast and nice for simple things, summarizing emails, suggested responses, stuff like that.

But for really in-depth work, going out and accomplishing things, agentic capabilities, it seems like Google has just fallen behind.

So, you may look at this and think, "Wow, why am I still holding this $200,000 investment? Why don't I take some gains?" That's because I've seen how quickly things can change in the AI race.

A couple months ago, it seemed like Meta was not even on on the map. They weren't even close. And now, Muse seems like it's in the lead with its personalized agentic capabilities.

So things can change very quickly with Google. I think you have reason to be patient.

Let's go ahead and first look at the valuation. Google today is not trading at a wild valuation. We want to look at the forward PE. It's at a 25. A 25 forward PE is good. It's a healthy PE, but it's nothing crazy.

Google's not being priced with incredible levels of expectation. These are good expectations priced in, but not great. We're not pricing in a 30 to 35 PE ratio. Right now, Apple trades at a 35.

Google trades at a 25. So, I look at this and I believe that right now we don't have an enormous amount of excess in the stock to begin with.

And then if we look at what's actually going on with Google's business, it doesn't look so bad. We have the revenue by segment, which over the past couple of years, it continues to grow in basically every segment.

Google search continues to grow like crazy, growing 17%. There are concerns about search in the future with all these agents and assistants. That's one part of Google's business that is somewhat exposed.

But Google has a lot of ways of dealing with this. Another big aspect of Google is YouTube. Google overall is around a $4 trillion business. And I believe that YouTube is worth around $1 trillion.

We have YouTube not only showing up with its advertising growth, around 12%. That's a little slow compared to the rest of Google, but this doesn't represent all of YouTube because a lot of YouTube's growth is in the subscription category with all of their YouTube premium memberships.

Subscriptions is growing around 17%. When you combine these together, it's 15% revenue growth. The cloud is growing like crazy. In this light blue, it grew 57% year-over-year. That's on a trailing 12-month basis.

The cloud backlog is up 374% now above half a trillion dollars. Google is also growing its topline quickly. The revenue growth is estimated to be at 23%. So we still have Google growing super fast even at its size 23% revenue growth.

Now one thing that we have to pay attention to is it says here that the earnings per share will decline by 27% next year. Now while that minus 27% analyst estimates is technically correct.

It's actual real data. That is only because they had massive gains in equity sales of things like SpaceX this past year. When we look at this on an organic basis, Google's still going to grow their EPS next year.

Around five or 6% is a current analyst estimate.

So, when I look at Google, I'm hesitant to take gains today. I'm not quite there yet. If the company trades up to a 30p ratio, then I'll strongly consider it and I'll likely trim some of my position.

But, as of right now, I believe it's still a hold.