Can Amazon Keep Up the Pace This Holiday Season?
December 1, 2017 by Chris LangeAmazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) has made an incredible run over the course of 2017, but is its momentum slowing as we get deeper in this holiday season?
Over the course of November, Amazon notched a gain of roughly 6.5%. While this is a solid gain for the month, and with the markets reaching higher highs, some investors want more bang for their buck. Granted this is outperforming the broad markets as well, but with all the hype around e-commerce going into this holiday season, there’s more to be desired.
An alternative to Amazon would be Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE: WMT), which saw its shares jump over 11% in November alone, although most of this was on the back of a strong earnings report. And what made this earnings report so special was that e-commerce sales exploded year over year.
Comparatively, Walmart is gaining ground now, but Amazon has been in the lead for some time. Walmart shares are up about 41% this year while Amazon shares are sitting on a 57% gain year to date.
Analysts are still going strong for Amazon. Oppenheimer reiterated an Outperform rating and raised its price target to $1,330. The brokerage firm said in its report:
AWS announced dozens of new services focused on databases, IoT and Serverless functionality, with more consumer applications than usual. Kubernetes, IOT Operating System, Bare Metal services and Serverless Aurora were some of the most important new announcements. AWS is now well positioned to be the platform company for IOT and democratizing AI. Most of the upgrades were incremental, and more targeted at competitors (Google) than usual. Machine Learning and AI were embedded in most new features. Conversations with AWS users highlighted continued strong demand, with expertise/app porting acting as the bottleneck. AWS’ dominance in serverless, global databases and AI is creating unique new services in an accelerated basis, driving unpredictable services/growth.
Also, Deutsche Bank raised its price target on Amazon to $1,425 from $1,200, while JMP Securities reiterated an Outperform rating with a $1,240 price target.
Shares of Amazon were last seen down 1.4% on the day at $1,159.99. The stock has a 52-week trading range of $736.70 to $1,213.41 and a consensus analyst price target of $1,243.91.
Walmart shares were trading at $96.83, with a consensus price target of $100.47 and a 52-week range of $65.28 to $100.13.
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