GOOG AND AM NEWS

Citigroup stumbles again
6:45am: Financial services giant records $5.1 billion loss, missing forecasts, after taking more than $12 billion in writedowns.


Oil nears $115, gas gets pricier



E*Trade cuts back as recession looms (not here yet?)


http://seekingalpha.com/article/72846-google-inc-q1-2008-earnings-call-transcript?source=yahoo (Goog transcript) 51% of rev's from overseas


Yahoo! appears to be pushing its luck. On April 10, the struggling Internet portal said it was testing a partnership to allow Google to host a small percentage of its search advertisements for two weeks. On Thursday, a week later, it inched further toward a long-term deal with Google because the companies are pleased with the initial results of the experiment, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The problem, as Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) pointed out in a statement last week, is that any potential deal between Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) and Yahoo! (nasdaq: YHOO - news - people ) raises antitrust concerns: Google receives 67% of all searches, and Yahoo! hosts 20%, according to March data from Web traffic analysis firm Hitwise. Combined, the two would represent a near monopoly of the search market.
Sharing its ad space with Google would also mean a quick revenue bump for Yahoo!, thanks to Google's higher percentage of clicks on ads. But just how far can a Yahoo! and Google liaison go?
"I hate to admit it, but Microsoft is right," asserts Robert Lande, a member of the American Antitrust Institute. "The closer Google and Yahoo! get to a deal, the closer they get to some very serious antitrust problems."
At the same time,
SOMETHING IS FISHY>????

GOOG 4% QTR OVER QTR???!!
But Google said so-called paid clicks grew 20% in the first quarter over the same year-ago quarter, and 4% over 2007's fourth quarter.

Google is only paid by its search advertisers when users click on such links.
Recent data from comScore Inc. has shown tepid paid-click growth during the first quarter, stirring concerns about the impact of the U.S. economic slowdown on Google and helping send its shares more than 30% lower between the beginning of the year and Thursday's earnings report.
Earlier this week, comScore reported that Google's paid clicks rose only 1.8% in the quarter compared with the period a year earlier, though its data don't include Google's international search markets. Google said Thursday that its paid clicks actually grew 20% in the quarter compared with the period a year earlier.
During a conference call with analysts, Chief Executive Eric Schmidt noted that the paid-click growth was "much higher than has been speculated by third parties."
Still, Google's 20% paid-click growth nonetheless marked a slowdown compared with the 30% growth in Google's previous, fourth fiscal quarter.
That's because the company, according to Collins Stewart analyst Sandeep Aggarwal, seems to be making the most out of the clicks that it's managing to get. "Maybe they are getting higher keyword prices from their advertisers. It was a beat quarter."

Part of that maturation has involved overseas expansion. Google announced that its international revenue reached $2.65 billion, or 51% of its total, compared with 47% of the total in the same period a year earlier.

BULLISH? CNBC

Seems like a lot of short covering, but the theory is...what? Earnings out, brokers unlikely to get worse? Well, sort of. As one trader in financials noted to me, "earnings have to be real bad, not just in line" to keep short positions on.
That's true, but the case for getting bullish is broader than that. Simply put, here's out the bulls are explaining it to me:
1) The write downs mean anything anymore, the story is old, the numbers are meaningless.
2) Probably one or two more rounds of it but the sentiment doesnt really change that much.
3) They are historically cheap, they have survived the meltdown and had no problems raising outside capital.
The downside to this game, as others have noted, is that if the quarter progresses and business is not getting any better, shorts will go right back on again.