Amazon.com Inc. shares continued their charge higher Friday, securing their highest close in more than two years.
The e-commerce giant’s stock advanced 2.7% in Friday’s session to finish the day at $174.45. That was the best ending level since Dec. 9, 2021, when Amazon’s stock
AMZN,
closed at $147.17, according to Dow Jones Market Data.
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Amazon briefly surpassed Alphabet Inc.
GOOG,
GOOGL,
as the third most valuable U.S. company by market capitalization last week, though it’s since fallen back to the No. 4 spot. Still, the recent momentum for Amazon shares has been enough to help the company hold down a place in the top four even as Nvidia Corp.
NVDA,
nips at its heels.
Alphabet finished Friday’s session with a $1.86 trillion market cap, while Amazon’s was $1.81 trillion and Nvidia’s was $1.78 trillion.
Wall Street had a mixed reaction to earnings from big technology companies this quarter, but Amazon’s results were among those that were well received.
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“Overall the overhangs which kept a lid on AMZN shares — e-commerce deceleration in 2021, e-commerce deceleration and margin compression in 2022 and AWS deceleration in 2023 — will have dissipated throughout 2024,” UBS analyst Stephen Ju wrote in a note to clients following those 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 before. The consumer discretionary sector is now expected to post 33% growth in EPS for the fourth quarter, according to FactSet, but without Amazon, that would swing to a decline of about 1%.