Amazon.com Inc. is pushing its weight around in the stock market.
The e-commerce giant’s rapid climb in recent years has only accelerated in 2018, pushing the company’s market cap above $700 billion for the first time on Wednesday. That puts it in rarefied territory alongside Apple Inc., Alphabet Inc., and Microsoft Corp.
Assuming the company finishes the session with a market cap above that milestone, it will have made the move in record time by multiple measures. The stock’s 25% surge this month pushed the market value from $600 billion to $700 billion in just 16 trading sessions.
The next fastest hops between $100 billion milestones for Amazon were the 135 sessions that it took to clear two separate hurdles: $300 billion in 2015 and $600 billion earlier this month, according to The Wall Street Journal’s Market Data Group. And it’s made the jump from $600 billion to $700 billion faster than any other company: Apple took 119 days, Alphabet took 372, and Microsoft took 4,548.
The milestone is the latest sign of just how much weight Amazon has to throw around in the stock market. And recently it’s been doing just that. On Tuesday, it sent health-care stocks tumbling after the firm, along with Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase, said it is creating a company to figure out how to reduce health-care costs.
The news was far from the only thing that pushed stocks down for their second consecutive session on Tuesday, but that certainly played a key role. The S&P 500 health-care sector fell 2.1% on the day, under-performing the broader index’s 1.1% drop and making it the worst-performing sector.
Shareholders of the healthcare giant UnitedHealth Group Inc, for example, took the news particularly hard, as the Journal’s Morning MoneyBeat newsletter noted on Wednesday. The stock fell 4.4% on Tuesday, subtracting 74 points from the Dow Jones Industrial Average, or more than a fifth of the index’s total decline.
Amazon’s foray into new industries has been known to derail entire stock market sectors from grocery stores to apparel makers. The market cap rise shows that Amazon and its technology-focused peers have ever-more influence in the broader stock market.
Gorilla
PHOTO: BLOOMBERG NEWS By Ben Eisen Jan 31, 2018 12:15 pm ET 0 COMMENTS Amazon.com Inc. is pushing its weight around in the stock market.
The e-commerce giant’s rapid climb in recent years has only accelerated in 2018, pushing the company’s market cap above $700 billion for the first time on Wednesday. That puts it in rarefied territory alongside Apple Inc., Alphabet Inc., and Microsoft Corp.
Assuming the company finishes the session with a market cap above that milestone, it will have made the move in record time by multiple measures. The stock’s 25% surge this month pushed the market value from $600 billion to $700 billion in just 16 trading sessions.
The next fastest hops between $100 billion milestones for Amazon were the 135 sessions that it took to clear two separate hurdles: $300 billion in 2015 and $600 billion earlier this month, according to The Wall Street Journal’s Market Data Group. And it’s made the jump from $600 billion to $700 billion faster than any other company: Apple took 119 days, Alphabet took 372, and Microsoft took 4,548.
The milestone is the latest sign of just how much weight Amazon has to throw around in the stock market. And recently it’s been doing just that. On Tuesday, it sent health-care stocks tumbling after the firm, along with Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase, said it is creating a company to figure out how to reduce health-care costs.
The news was far from the only thing that pushed stocks down for their second consecutive session on Tuesday, but that certainly played a key role. The S&P 500 health-care sector fell 2.1% on the day, under-performing the broader index’s 1.1% drop and making it the worst-performing sector.
Shareholders of the healthcare giant UnitedHealth Group Inc, for example, took the news particularly hard, as the Journal’s Morning MoneyBeat newsletter noted on Wednesday. The stock fell 4.4% on Tuesday, subtracting 74 points from the Dow Jones Industrial Average, or more than a fifth of the index’s total decline.
Amazon’s foray into new industries has been known to derail entire stock market sectors from grocery stores to apparel makers. The market cap rise shows that Amazon and its technology-focused peers have ever-more influence in the broader stock market.
MORE IN MORNING MONEYBEAT Reality May Be Setting in for the Stock Market U.S. Companies Are Seeing Surprisingly Good Sales Wall Street Strategists Can’t Keep Up With the Stock Market As 'America First' Trade Focus Returns, The Dollar Is Still Too Strong The Surprising Peso Rally Probably Can't Last Much Longer These days, Amazon makes up 2.9% of the market capitalization of the S&P 500, according to FactSet. That’s up from 1.7% at the end of January last year, according to S&P Dow Jones Indices.
Amazon’s massive market value and its ability to impact other companies’ results expose investors to the risk that any news from the tech giant has the ability to single-handedly determine the direction of large swaths of market, investors say. It comes at a time when stocks are already trading at a high level relative to earnings, and some investors are growing nervous about complacency in the market.
Of course, shares of Amazon itself haven’t been falling. Even as the broader stock market was reeling on Tuesday, Amazon shares rose 1.4% to a fresh record. On Wednesday, the shares were up another 1.5%, poised to set yet another new high.
Article by Wall Street Journal
Link (Source):https://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2018/01/31/amazon-is-throwing-its-weight-around-in-the-stock-market-too/
Note: It could soon be pay walled so I had to quick do this. Anyhow, this is just the beginning of my prediction. Go AMZN!
Submitted January 31, 2018 at 01:06PM by snack-fu-bling http://ift.tt/2DPjxA5
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