Spare Google! For God's Sake Spare It

Google - It is the darling stock of any finance professor. It is the most quoted/exploited stock in any B-school finance assignment/home-work/exam. In the past two weeks, I valued Google's equity more times than the number of fingers in my hand.

"Oh. Valuation is so much fun", I heard a friend say. As for me, given a choice, I would rather watch metal rust.

Almost every student here had a (different) valuation of the company. The gamut of values that we got for Google's share price by subjecting it to every conceivable valuation technique known to mankind is stunning. I wouldn't be surprised if Larry or Sergey stares right into a half-baked MBA learning the ropes of evaluation pronounce Google as a penny stock. It is just a matter of which technique he chooses, you see. (By the way, the beauty of finance is that "Reverse Engineernig" part. For any finance problem, you can start with an answer and fish for a technique that will give you that number. Chances are that some bloke in some remote corner of the world sometime would have given the right recipe to cook your numbers the way you want them.)

It is time we spare Google. Let the professionals take on.