It was a fairly volatile week for my trading and for the overall market! I did keep my average trade “profitable” but it’s not the easiest environment to trade in. As always, you can see my live tech long & short trades and performance here:

–2013 Long & Short Tech Stock Picks

Today’s trade involves two companies that I’ve traded against each other both in 2011 and 2012, one being profitable and the other being a losing trade. Overall, Valueclick has performed much better than I expected but I still think its underlying business growth is fairly limited. You can see the numbers here:

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Yes, Valueclick did have a rebound in general growth but apart from one quarter, Google remains the much faster growing company and the fact that they’re trading at virtually the same forward P/E does not seem reasonable to me.

GOOG Revenue Quarterly YoY Growth data by YCharts

Long Google (GOOG)

I’ve been animate about the fact that Google is a tremendous long term play. To say that a great long term play will be as good in the short term is a bit more difficult because Google is clearly much more worried about building great products than shorter term profits. That being said, I do think the company will continue to do well.

Next earnings release: April 12 2013

Short ValueClick (VCLK)

Valueclick has done well in recent months but its underlying business continues to increase at about half of the pace of Google. The company is a solid player in the web advertising market but it’ll continue to remain a much smaller player than players such as Google and Yahoo.

Next earnings release: May 2 2013

If ever any of you are interested in my technology stock thoughts and picks, I invite you to my tech stocks newsletter, it’s free and you’ll get an email bi-weekly with additional thoughts on many of these names:

Disclaimer: I will enter into the trade this morning but have no positions as of this time…