If Google ad revenues are down 50%, how can Google be at $1200/share? Doesn't that make this a good short candidate? Nothing else Google has is profitable except for the ad business. The same goes for Facebook as well.
Another thing, Google has an exceptionally strong balance sheet and can weather this recession for many years if need be. They're not going bankrupt any time soon. You don't go and just short such companies when there's still plenty of leveraged junk out there.
Everybody expects ad revenue to rebound fairly quickly once this is over. You don't expect COVID-19 to be cutting Google's revenue in half over the next 20 years, do you?
That said, analysts will make guesses based on financial projections and then give multiples to things like revenue or earnings, depending on the company. If a quarter of Google's revenues is impacted, it will have immediate effects. Of course, that's assuming that it's only a single quarter's revenue which in this case would be wrong. You're talking months of high unemployment globally.
Well of course! Nobody knows what the future will be -- it's all best-educated guesses. That doesn't contradict my point.
The stock price winds up being a kind of market-driven wisdom-of-crowds situation of a ton of different people's guesswork, mostly institutions with teams of researchers.
Obviously Google's price has been impacted. But the point is the price hasn't been impacted nearly to the same degree as immediate revenue. Because? People expect Google to be around and doing fine for a couple of decades.
So you're right that these things can't be perfectly predicted... but the stock price still is the result of everyone's predictions, as imperfect as they are. It's not "laughable" -- it's literally how it works, and if you don't believe that, I don't know what to tell you.