Shares of Amazon.com Inc. continued to climb Friday, securing their highest close in more than two years.
Shares of the e-commerce giant rose 2.7% in Friday’s session to close the day at $174.45. This was the best finishing level since December 9, 2021, when shares of Amazon AMZN,
it closed at $147.17, according to Dow Jones market data.
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Amazon briefly overtook Alphabet Inc. GOOG,
GOOGLE,
as the third most valuable U.S. company by market capitalization last week, although it has since fallen back to fourth place. However, Amazon stock’s recent momentum has been enough to help the company maintain a spot in the top four, even as Nvidia Corp. NVDA,
bites at his heels.
Alphabet ended Friday’s session with a market capitalization of $1.86 trillion, while Amazon’s was $1.81 trillion and Nvidia’s was $1.78 trillion.
Wall Street had mixed reactions to big tech companies’ earnings this quarter, but Amazon’s results were among those that were well received.
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“Overall, the excesses that have kept AMZN stock in check – e-commerce deceleration in 2021, e-commerce deceleration and margin compression in 2022, and AWS deceleration in 2023 – will have dissipated over the course of 2024 ,” UBS analyst Stephen Ju wrote in a note to clients tracking such results.
The company has been a huge driver of earnings growth for the S&P 500 consumer discretionary sector, as its quarterly earnings per share grew to $1 in the latest quarter from 3 cents a year earlier. According to FactSet, the consumer discretionary sector is now expected to post 33% EPS growth for the fourth quarter, but without Amazon, that would hover around a decline of about 1%.