There's an absolutist view on covering financial markets I've developed over the years which says that when a stock goes up, something good has happened, and when a stock goes down, something bad has happened.

The beauty of markets is that it only takes one person disagreeing with this view to "make a market," and thus, we are left with an efficient machine known as the modern financial market.

And so on this basis, we argue that investors are actually concerned about reporting late Tuesday that said the US government will be looking to break up Google. In afternoon trade, shares of its parent company Alphabet were down 3%.

Tuesday's report from Bloomberg outlined the variety of remedies the government could propose —spinning off Android, or Chrome, forcing a sale of AdWords, and so on.

Former Microsoft exec Steve Sinofsky had a great thread on X about the issue, noting that any process will take years and that floating these proposals through the press is, and will continue to be, part of the action.

For a lot of analysts and investors, these years-long legal unknowns can prove a real challenge.

Many analysts will maintain a sum of the parts valuation of companies they cover, which values the distinct units — say, YouTube, Chrome, Android, and so on — on a hypothetical standalone basis.

The math here might even make a breakup almost look appealing.

Additionally, it's very hard to capture in a financial model any kind of institutional lag, complacency, or other negative side effect that might result from having an issue like a government-forced breakup of your company hanging over your head.

But as Sinofsky nods at in his thread, there's a credible view that the consent decree which lingered over Microsoft did lead to the company "missing" some of the biggest computing trends — notably mobile — in the years that followed the ruling.

And while it might be hard to remember now, the stock was dead money from the height of the tech bubble until 2015.