Get Ready for the Fall

"The bigger they are, the harder they fall." This old saying sums up the worst nightmare of every homeowner, every gold buyer, and every investor in today's market. Dare ye buy at the top?

Every day, Nasdaq.com publishes a list of the market's top stocks -- the companies whose shares have just hit their highest intraday price of any time in the past 52 weeks. Every day, investors read this list and tremble -- some with greed (big mo', baby!), and others in pure, unmitigated, acrophobic terror (whatever you do, don't look down).

Over on Motley Fool CAPS, tens of thousands of investors just like you are watching these same companies and voting their gut on whether they'll keep rising or stumble and fall. Usually, the ratings wax optimistic as stocks hit new highs -- because everyone loves a winner. But what do you make of it when some of the smartest investors out there are panning a hot stock?

You could heed them. You could ignore them. You could take the stock tickers and construct anagrams from 'em. For my money, though, the best course of action is to use the "52 Week High" list as a starting point for further research. After all, stocks can go up for many reasons, and it's up to you to decide how worthy those reasons are. Thanks to Motley Fool CAPS, you don't have to make the decision alone.

With that said, let's meet today's list of contenders, drawn from the latest list at Nasdaq.com. What does our panel of more than 70,000 stock gurus have to say about them?

Everybody loves a winner
It had to happen sooner or later, right? You just knew that Google would eventually top the list of companies making 52-week highs, while simultaneously anchoring the list of companies no one thinks deserve their price. Well, at the risk of belaboring the obvious, Google is indeed the target of our darts this morning.

Let's get right to the ranting. Let's examine how one of the most successful companies of all time earns nearly unmitigated disdain from some of the world's best investors ... drumroll ...

TMFMoby lays out the case for us:

Google is the best search engine, and will continue to be for a long time. The problem is that everyone already knows this, so how is the stock going to go up? They have to continuously expand into new money-making areas to increase their actual value, which they have so far been unsuccessful. 

Honestly, TMFMoby's pitch summarizes 90% of the Google pitches you'll find on CAPS. There's very little to add, substantively, so instead I'll go for style, and history, in our next two excerpts. Namely:

• sfghouse does a superb job of putting Google's valuation in context for us. "Google is not worth 2 Yahoos (NASDAQ:YHOO) and 1 eBay (NASDAQ:EBAY)." (But to put that in context, only 14 months after sfghouse painted that picture for us, Google is today worth two Yahoos, an eBay, and a pair of Amazons (NASDAQ:AMZN).)
• And last but not least, a blast from the past from CAPS legend TMFEldrehad, who mused way back in August 2006 that, "As good as Google is, I just find it hard to imagine how a $100B+ market cap company can grow into a 50+ trailing P/E valuation." (Now try imagining it growing into a $200B+ market cap, Eld.)

What do all three of these pitches have in common? They're all losing to the market, as Google's stock roars skyward, giving no sign that it acknowledges the law of gravity. Go figure.

Time to chime in
With nearly 7,000 Fools on record for or against it on CAPS, it seems everyone has an opinion about Google. What's yours?