You're Being Lied To About Google Stock

**Joseph Carlson** (0:00)
There's always a lot of confusion in the stock market. Investors like you and me are always trying to figure out what narrative is true and which one is amongst all the information and opinions shared about every company that we invest in. If you take an average company like Google or Tesla, there's gonna be a thousand opinions on it, a thousand stories. And we know that the best investors are the ones that are able to dissect the truth, what's actually going on with the company, and then making sound investments based off of the truth.
But what I believe is happening today, after looking at social media, after looking at the market over the past couple of weeks, as we wrap up the second week of this earnings, is that I believe it's never been more difficult for investors to find the truth, to actually understand what's going on with the company. And that is because of social media.
We're in a situation now where there is so much slop, so many stories, so many blatant lies and mistruths, misinformation shared every single day, that it is almost impossible to filter and sift through all of it. Right now, many accounts online are sharing factually incorrect information, things that are provably wrong. When they're presented with the truth, when their lies are completely disproven to their face, they don't offer any type of apology or correction. They simply double down, insisting that they're not wrong despite the facts in front of them. This is the attitude and behavior of literally hundreds of accounts that influence investors every single day.
And it's becoming more difficult, I believe, for investors to maintain a long-term perspective. So in this episode, I believe it's necessary to not only address these companies' earnings reports. We'll be looking at ASML and Netflix and Google in the episode, and what these companies are doing. But not only that, I want to address some of the narratives that have been shared around these companies and some of the tactics that people are using to try to manipulate other investors with half-truths or falsehoods. We'll be doing a little bit of separating fact from fiction. So we have all of that to get into, plus we have two fail of the weeks today. We're going to be highlighting President Trump. It's finally his time. He made it into the fail of the week. And we also have trial lawyers. And we'll be going into why both of them are the fail of the week in this episode. Now let's go ahead and jump right in. Before we get into the earnings reports themselves, I think it's important to address why I believe many investors are making mistakes in today's market. And a lot of it comes down to what investors are focusing on. For example, I've always seen the data that investors are better at buying homes than they are stocks. On average, when somebody buys a home and makes that investment, which it can be viewed as an investment, you're buying a piece of real estate, you're buying land, you're buying property, that's an investment, people overall make money on homes. They make good money on homes. Homes have been some of the most predictably good returning investments that individuals have made throughout history. In fact, Peter Lynch said that a home is typically a person's best investment. Now, that may not be too surprising at first, but consider that for a moment. Investors almost always make money on homes, but they frequently lose money on stocks. And there are reasons that contribute to that. One of them is that people naturally do better research when buying a home. When you're buying a home, you consider it a big purchase. You go inside the house. You inspect the floorboards. You look at the countertops. You peek into the attic and make sure everything looks good. You look for cracks in the concrete of the foundation. You look at the home and you also look at the area. You look at what schools they have nearby. What's the crime rate like? Which parks are they next to? What are the neighbors like? What is the whole neighborhood like? When people do research on a home, they do very thorough due diligence on the home itself. Now, investors do some level of due diligence on a stock, but it's not nearly to the same extent they do on buying a home. Many investors will look at a stock for 15 minutes and decide to throw some money into it. So the level of research is not the same. Another big aspect is the time horizon. When investors buy a stock, they like to pretend like they're buying it for the long term. That's what most investors say when they're entering into a position. Well, I'm going to buy Google for 10 years. I'm going to hold on to it and not worry about the short term. But then that Google investor will most likely be looking at the stock on a day-to-day basis. Right after buying it, they'll see if it's up or down the very next day. But I don't see a lot of homeowners doing the same thing. It's rare that someone moves into their house and the first thing that they do the next day is check Zillow, and then check it the next day after that and the next day after that. It'd be even more rare if they checked it more times throughout the day, multiple times throughout the day. There's not many homeowners who their morning routine involves checking their home value. That's just not something real estate investors do.