The search giant is hiring Wall Street vets to manage a $26.5 billion pile of cash.
Last fall, some unusual job listings began cropping up on Google's (GOOG) website. Amid the requests for programmers and engineers were postings for bond traders and portfolio analysts. By spring, tech blogs were speculating about what was going on at Google.
The answer was very un-Silicon Valley. Google, it turns out, has launched a trading floor to manage its $26.5 billion in cash and short-term investments. The hoard is the third-biggest cash pile among U.S. tech companies, after Microsoft (MSFT) and Cisco's (CSCO).
One of the company's goals is to improve the returns on its money, which until now has been managed conservatively. Google doesn't disclose its rate of return on investments or the targets it has set, but analyst Aaron Kessler of ThinkEquity estimates the company's 2010 return (including interest income and realized and unrealized gains before tax) at around 2.5 percent. That's a higher return than some other large Internet outfits, such as Yahoo! and Amazon, he says...
Douglas MacMillan writes at BusinessWeek
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