PremiumEncased In Carbon-ite: Alphabet Post-Mortem As AI Mode Eats Search Pricing, Cash Burn Deepens, And Buybacks Vanish
Well, that was ugly: a few hours after we laid out everything the buyside wanted from Alphabet (GOOGL), the company delivered almost none of it, and the stock plunged after an ugly top and bottom line miss. This morning it is down roughly 11% premarket, around $290, dragging Nasdaq futures down 1% while the Russell is up. The only number that beat was Cloud, and even there the buyside was hoping for more.
Having slept on it, the sellside verdict is in, and it's not much kinder than the after-hours tape. Below we go through what JPMorgan's trading desk and Goldman (via its trader Thales Arruda and internet analyst Eric Sheridan) make of the wreckage, plus a few things in the filing that the headlines missed... like the fact that a company that bought back $39.8 billion of stock in the first nine months of 2025 has bought back zero in 2026, and is now selling it instead.