Q4 earnings for Google’s (GOOG) parent company, Alphabet surprised everyone yesterday. While the market value of Apple (AAPL) has steadily been decreasing since mid-2015, the market value of Alphabet has been increasing ever since 2012. If you were smart enough to invest in Google four years ago when the company had a market capitalization of $200 billion, you would be sitting pretty today knowing that the company’s market capitalization is hovering around $500 billion. By contrast, Apple was valued at approximately $400 billion in 2012 and is currently valued at around $500 billion in 2016.

A sharp depreciation in the price of Apple stocks has been one of the most notable developments in the technology sector, and nobody is quite sure how to arrest the declines in what was previously the world’s most valuable tech company. Take a look at the below graphic which indicates in no uncertain terms how sharply Apple has depreciated and how strongly Alphabet has appreciated. As a binary options trader, this information naturally lends itself to call options on Google and Alphabet (the parent company) and put options on Apple.

clash of the tech titans

Of course, the most important component of Alphabet Inc. is Google. And this is precisely the business unit that reported huge earnings in 2015. In Q4, 2015 earnings reports were strongly bullish and this helped to power the company’s share price to $820.44 (+6.4%). If these gains remain today and for the rest of the week we will invariably see Apple being sidelined by Alphabet as the #1 most valuable company in the world. The biggest earnings spikes for Google came from Android and YouTube, and search, which increased to $74.54 billion (+13.5%). The annual operating income from these 3 business units summed to $23.4 billion – substantially higher than the $19.01 billion in 2014. Alphabet has been hampered by calls of late for greater transparency and it obliged with a new structure that is being warmly welcomed. There are several reasons why Alphabet is growing at a rate of knots, including the following:

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