Hong Kong stocks surged alongside other markets in Asia on Wednesday, as the US and Iran struck a two-week ceasefire, reviving demand for risk assets that was pummelled by surging oil prices and fear of global stagflation. The Hang Seng Index rose 2.7 per cent to 25,801.54 points as of 10.38am local time, reopening trading after three days of public holidays. The mainland’s CSI 300 Index climbed 1...
Hong Kong stocks surged alongside other markets in Asia on Wednesday, as the US and Iran struck a two-week ceasefire, reviving demand for risk assets that was pummelled by surging oil prices and fear of global stagflation. The Hang Seng Index rose 2.7 per cent to 25,801.54 points as of 10.38am local time, reopening trading after three days of public holidays. The mainland’s CSI 300 Index climbed 1.7 per cent and the Shanghai Composite Index added 1 per cent. The tentative ceasefire came just...
400tmax/iStock Unreleased via Getty Images Introduction What makes Alphabet ( GOOGL ) an exciting investment prospect currently is the fact that it is one of the key players in the AI revolution but is undervalued relative to its peers amid all the buzz around them. What I think explains the underperformance of the stock is that it is not due to any weakness in its finances, but merely that the ma...
400tmax/iStock Unreleased via Getty Images Introduction What makes Alphabet ( GOOGL ) an exciting investment prospect currently is the fact that it is one of the key players in the AI revolution but is undervalued relative to its peers amid all the buzz around them. What I think explains the underperformance of the stock is that it is not due to any weakness in its finances, but merely that the market is concerned about the possibility of disruption within the Search category and rising capital expenditures related to AI. AI Is Expanding the Economic Surface of Search The latest earnings results of Alphabet did not come with any surprises; however, the report contained several trends that have changed the overall impression about the company's future prospects. The Q4 revenue increased by 18% year over year to $113.8 billion , and net income increased to 30%. Q4 2025 Earnings For some reason, there's a narrative that AI will hurt the search business. It's not right, at least in this situation. Instead of shrinking the business, AI is driving search engine evolution. According to management, users are interacting with it differently; they ask more complicated questions and conduct longer conversations that involve follow-up questions after initial ones. All this can be attributed to AI usage; thus, it's not cannibalization but rather increased engagement of users. Moreover, these longer and more complicated questions were hard to monetize historically since it was hard to understand the exact intent of the user. Now AI can help with that and allow matching queries to ads, hence boosting monetization efficiency. In other words, AI can drive growth by increasing both the volume of queries and their monetization efficiency. It's hard not to like such a perspective. Cloud Is No Longer Optional, It's Core Search is evolving fast, and Cloud continues to drive the same trend. For instance, in Q4 its revenue rose by 48%, reaching almost $17.7 billion, and its backlog increas...