Reporting strong third-quarter results yesterday, Alphabet’s GOOGL stock popped to a three-month high of over $180 a share before giving back some of its post-earnings gains and falling another -2% in Thursday’s trading session.
That said, GOOGL has outperformed the broader indexes over the last two years and investors may be wondering if it’s time to buy Alphabet’s stock for another bounce higher after impressively exceeding Q3 expectations and posting stellar quarterly growth.
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Alphabet’s Strong Q3 Results
Alphabet’s Q3 sales of $74.54 billion beat estimates of $72.84 billion by 2% and rose 16% from $64.05 billion in the prior-year quarter. This was driven by strong growth in its Google Services segment which includes Google Search. Higher revenue among YouTube ads and Google Cloud also attributed to Alphabet’s top line expansion with AI Infrastructure and Generative AI solutions being a significant underlying catalyst.
Taking advantage of such, Alphabet posted Q3 EPS of $2.12 which surpassed expectations of $1.83 a share by nearly 16%. More impressive, Alphabet’s Q3 earnings soared 37% from $1.55 per share in the comparative period.
Furthermore, Alphabet has now surpassed the Zacks EPS Consensus for seven consecutive quarters posting an average earnings surprise of 11.84% in its last four quarterly reports.
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The Case for Buying GOOGL
Starting to reconfirm projections of double-digit top and bottom line growth in fiscal 2024 and FY25, Alphabet’s valuation helps the case that now is a good time to buy GOOGL.
With Alphabet having the cheapest forward P/E valuation (22.8X) among the Magnificent 7-themed big tech stocks, it’s also noteworthy that EPS estimates are nicely up in the last 30 days for both FY24 and FY25.
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Final Thoughts
Investing in one of the Mag-7 tech stocks while it trades beneath the benchmark S&P 500’s 24.7X forward earnings multiple is hard to overlook. Even better, Alphabet’s stock may be poised for another bounce higher as the trend of positive earnings estimate revisions should continue following its strong Q3 results with GOOGL sporting a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy).
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