Further to our Google article (Google lays down challenge to Bloomberg with Brittan hire), rumours about its financial ambitions have spread, with some even believing that Google is looking to set up its own hedge fund. Business insider spotted a variety of job vacancies for Google including trader of government bonds, portfolio analyst for Google’s US government bond portfolio and a portfolio analyst for agency mortgage-backed securities. The trader job was the give-away for the hedge fund speculation. And of course it would have nothing to do with Google having a treasury management function, much like any business of its size would.
But the rumours of Google’s move into trading were, to some extent, fuelled by the company’s big cheese. At a media summit in Dubai earlier this month, co-founder Eric Schmidt referenced the possibility of mining Google’s vast reserves of query data to play the stock market. “One day we had a conversation where we figured we could just try to predict the stock market,” he said. “And then we decided it was illegal. So we stopped doing that.”
Google’s wealth of data is certainly frightening.