Yahoo! May Become 'Google Junior'

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- It's a stock that has an average daily trading volume (three-month) of almost 15.7 million shares, and at one point it sold for more than $100 a share.

The financial portion of its Web site is one of the most popular of its kind. Pundits proclaim that three-quarters of all the people who use the internet in the U.S. visit its site every month, yet it hasn't been able to garner much respect from the investment community.

Yahoo! Inc.(YHOO) has been its own worst enemy as an investment. The stock has been a flatliner unless you purchased it on Aug. 10, 2011, when it hit its 52-week low of $11.62.

Since the beginning of 2012 it's traded in a tight range between $16.39 on Jan. 3 to $14.35 on March 6. But let's take a walk down fantasy lane and see where Yahoo shares have been shortly after they became a publicly-traded company.

Using one of Yahoo! Finance's own charts you can see the price history over the past 16 years. It reached the top of "Everest" only once.

In May 1996 you could have picked up this nascent company at $1.26 a share, and much to your surprise and glee you could have sold it at the top of the dot-com mountain in December 1999 at $112.

Now the board of directors has taken on yet another new name as their CEO, and acquired her from a true superstar in the world of the Internet. That part is old news. The part that may be new and promising is that Marissa A. Mayer may know how to turn tin into gold, the "Google way".

Just like the history of Google(GOOG) Mayer's decisions could turn a small frog that can lay a lot of eggs into a very big frog that can lay billions of big eggs (I watched the latest version of "The Muppet Movie" last night and it is impacting my metaphors "Kermit-style").

Let's look at a longer-term chart comparing Google's stock price and earnings-per-share growth with that of Yahoo's. First let's see the chart with the price comparison of the two companies' shares: