NEW YORK, Jan 9, 2026, 16:37 EST — After-hours
- Alphabet’s Class C shares added about 1% in after-hours trading.
- Google’s parent company scheduled Feb. 4 to report quarterly results and hold an earnings call.
- A filing showed CEO Sundar Pichai sold 32,500 Class C shares on Jan. 7.
Alphabet’s Class C shares added about 1% to $329.14 in after-hours trading Friday.
Traders are also eyeing two dates in the near term: Alphabet set Feb. 4 for its fourth-quarter and full-year 2025 results and conference call, due after the close at 4:30 p.m. ET. The Class C shares (GOOG) have no voting rights; Class A (GOOGL) gets one vote per share.
Cantor Fitzgerald, in Street calls tracked by TipRanks, upgraded Alphabet to “overweight” from “neutral” and raised its price target to $370 from $310. “Overweight” is analyst shorthand for expecting a stock to beat its sector or coverage universe. In a note cited by MarketWatch, Cantor’s Deepak Mathivanan dubbed Alphabet the “king of all AI trades.” TipRanks
A filing showed Chief Executive Sundar Pichai unloaded 32,500 Class C shares on Jan. 7 across multiple transactions for about $10.4 million. That left him holding 2,244,372 Class C shares and 227,560 Class A shares. The Form 4 said the sales were made under a Rule 10b5-1 plan — a pre-arranged trading program that sets conditions for future stock sales.
Regulators remain an overhang. EU antitrust authorities are due by Feb. 10 to say whether they’ll clear Alphabet’s $32 billion purchase of cybersecurity company Wiz — its biggest deal — according to a European Commission filing reported by Reuters. The Commission could clear the deal outright, clear it with remedies, or open a deeper investigation.
In Washington, three Democratic U.S. senators called on Apple and Google to pull X and its Grok chatbot from their app stores over the spread of nonconsensual sexual images, Reuters reported — another case where app-store policing can quickly turn into a political brawl. Google did not immediately comment, Reuters said.
Big-cap tech caught a bid late Friday, with the Invesco QQQ Trust up about 1% and the SPDR S&P 500 ETF up about 0.6%.
Even so, the run-up to earnings isn’t straightforward. Investors still have to judge whether stepped-up AI and data-center spending keeps pressuring margins, and whether regulators muddy the Wiz deal or dial up scrutiny of Google’s platform rules.
Still to come: Alphabet’s results and management commentary after the close on Feb. 4, with focus on advertising trends, Google Cloud demand and any update on the Wiz timetable.
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