Shorts Sellers Running Scared Before Amazon.com Earnings (AMZN)

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published

If you have seen the run in Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) in 2007, you’d think it was 1999.  Shares are up 200% from its 52-week lows, and the short sellers have noticed how stocks of R-I-M, Google, and Apple have all launched on earnings.  These are all part of Jim Cramer’s "New Four Horsemen of Tech" and are all up big in recent weeks and for the year.

Shares are up almost 6% ahead of today’s earnings.  This last quarter is always sort of the throw-away quarter, but the quarter guidance will be covering what should be the largest Amazon quarter ever.  First Call has estimates for this past quarter at $0.18 EPS and $3.14 Billion revenues, and more importantly it has the current quarter ahead estimates at $0.46 EPS on revenues of nearly $5.2 Billion.  In the event we get some business model numbers for 2008, First Call has estimates roughly of $1.55 EPS on $17.6 Billion in revenues.

After you see the individual metrics, you may feel wishy washy on how to call this one.  Analysts as a group are nearly impossible to use for a target reading because price targets are well above and well below the current stock price.  Options trader expectations are hard to peg as well, because on one calculation I derive less than a $5.00 move and one more than an $8.00 move being priced in (shares moved much more in the last two-quarters).  Its chart is also hard to call because shares hit a new high on a gap-up day after being is a solid $89 to $92 range for the last few days.

What is obvious is that this 36.8 million share short interest at the end of September is going to play a major factor, even if the short interest is lower than during the last two reports.  The biggest focus here will be guidance, at least barring anything massive about the last quarter.

Jon C. Ogg
October 23, 2007

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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