Google-parent Alphabet initially grew by nearly 2% in after-hours trading late July 23 after the search giant released its quarterly record high in Q2 earnings at the level of $1.89 per share, which was equal to its Q1 achievements. However, the share price of Google erased the gains very soon and even dropped by more than 5% or by around $10 per share in the pre-market trading on July 24. The current levels at $172 per share of Google or even lower were detected last time in early June. So, what has caused a mixed perception of the report by market communities?

Google's revenue added 14% YoY to $84.74 billion vs consensus projections of $84.16 billion, a great result, which is $4.2 billion higher than in the first three months of the year, yet falling short of Google's own new super standard at $86.31 billion, once established in the Christmas quarter of 2023. Besides, search and cloud parts of the business generated good profit on higher revenue while sales numbers from YouTube advertisement came out at $8.66 billion after posting $8.1 billion ad sales for the first quarter of 2024 vs supposedly higher expert estimates of $8.95 billion. Now we can see a mirror situation against late April, when Wall Street expected YouTube’s ad revenue for Q1 to come in at $7.72 billion, surpassing targets that time and now excessive hype is offset by moderate growth.

Meanwhile, Google's rise in the digital advertising industry gave $64.62 billion of sales altogether against average analyst estimate of $64.53 billion, also much better than $61.66 billion brought in Q1 and up from $58.14 billion in the same period YoY. Google Cloud business contributed $10.35 billion vs $10.20 billion expected to surpass a $10 billion milestone for the first time ever, while operating income for Google Cloud reached $1.17 billion, well above analyst pool estimates of $982.2 million. Alphabet group's capital expenditures were at $13.19 billion, above the averagely anticipated $12.2 billion, which may indicate continuing investments in its businesses.

Even the company’s “Other Bets” unit, including smaller branches like its self-driving car company Waymo, reportedly generated $365 million, up from $285 million YoY. Its finance chief Ruth Porat announced that Alphabet is going to invest $5 billion in Waymo in near future as the service became available for San Francisco users, a second citywide rollout, after its 2020 debut in the Phoenix metropolitan area. Waymo cars are now making 50,000 weekly paid public rides.

Thus, the only real fault in Alphabet's numbers was that they did not show such overwhelming evidence of faster and wider progress in each of the segments as the spectators were betting. Sometimes the crowd may downplay results when it cherishes hopes for the future, but this is just the situation when both optimists and realists were probably expecting too much but ahead of time and an actual pace of growth. Yet, this growth looks solid and fundamentally justified in the case of Google shares, so that the renewal of uptrend is only a question of proper timing and pricing.

Google stock started the year of 2024 around $140 per share. Since then, its business was growing very well, and a break through its April's resistance line at nearly $160 was an important episode of the rally. If so, we feel a $160-165 area as a very strong support, and a vicinity of $150 as an extremely strong support area, with a potential to launch new massive buy positions by many Wall Street habitues before reaching it again. Again, any levels below $170 are looking nice and rather attractive for purchasing more stakes in Google, in this context, keeping in mind an all-time high at $191.75, which has been achieved only a couple of weeks ago.