GOOG, BIDU, YHOO

Which one for me? Should I take my small trading account and wrap it up in GOOG or BIDU or buy a bit of YHOO and distribute the rest somewhere else? What if I just bought a few shares of GOOG - would that be worth anything over time?

Questions, questions, questions. Three stocks with three different price ranges and three different stories in the popular press. To read the stories one would think that YHOO was toast and BIDU didn't stand a chance because the monster GOOG is coming to assimilate them. When you look at the following chart you get a different story.



When the returns are normalized and analyzed together on Marlyn's amazing Curve we see that sometimes GOOG leads, sometimes BIDU leads and most of the time YHOO holds its own. One thing that I did notice however is this -



YHOO often leads BIDU on the turns - both up and down. I don't know if you could use that factoid to inform your investments in BIDU - i.e. to beat the crowd - but it might not be a bad idea for you to start watching YHOO in this regard.

As always this is just an idea and ideas are dime a dozen. You must do your own analysis and be comfortable with your own approach.