Where Will Amazon Stock Be in 3 Years?

Where Will Amazon Stock Be in 3 Years?

A combination of cost-cutting and AI-led growth could give this e-commerce leader a bright future.

With its shares up 23% year to date, Amazon (AMZN 1.43%) has finally bounced back from its post-pandemic slump. The recovery hinged on streamlining its e-commerce business and pivoting to exciting new growth drivers like artificial intelligence (AI).

Let’s explore how these dynamics can continue to unfold over the next three years.

A leaner and meaner Amazon

While layoffs and cost-cutting can invoke a feeling of dread for middle managers and other replaceable employees, they can be great news to investors who want a more streamlined and profitable company. For Amazon, these controversial efforts are delivering in a big way.

The company’s first-quarter revenue increased by a modest 13% year over year to $143.3 billion, but operating income surged more than 200% to $15.3 billion. Many of these improvements came from unlocking efficiencies in North American and international e-commerce, which had previously suffered from weak margins because of pandemic-era overexpansion under Amazon’s former CEO, Jeff Bezos.

The new CEO, Andy Jassy, is extensively cutting costs. He also isn’t just chasing short-term profits.

And Jassy is refocusing the company on what historically made it so successful in the first place: the customer experience. In the first quarter, Amazon achieved its fastest-ever delivery speeds, with nearly 60% of Prime members’ orders arriving within two days in the country’s 60 largest metro areas.

And in major international cities including London, Tokyo, and Toronto, three out of four items arrived within two days.

Investors shouldn’t expect the massive e-commerce business to be a big growth driver over the next three years. But the company can leverage its scale and operational efficiencies to maintain its dominant position, keeping customers satisfied while delivering reliable profits to investors.

Medium-term growth drivers

Read More

Beyond Nvidia: 1 Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stock With More Upside to Buy Now, According to Wall Street

Beyond Nvidia: 1 Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stock With More Upside to Buy Now, According to Wall Street

Wall Street sees only modest upside in Nvidia, but analysts are projecting significant gains for Snowflake shareholders.

The S&P 500 (^GSPC -0.04%) has advanced 11% year to date, and Nvidia (NVDA 1.75%) alone is responsible for one-third of those gains. The chipmaker has seen its share price surge 121% since January due to strong demand for data-center compute and networking products, especially those related to artificial intelligence.

However, Wall Street expects Nvidia to lose momentum over the next year. The median 12-month price target of $1,200 per share implies just 6% upside from its current price of $1,137 per share. By comparison, Snowflake (SNOW 1.01%) carries a median 12-month price target of $205 per share, implying 51% upside from its current price of $136 per share.

Is it time to sell Nvidia and buy Snowflake? Here’s what investors should know.

1. Nvidia

Nvidia reported blockbuster financial results in the first quarter of fiscal 2025 (ended April 28). Revenue increased 262% to $26 billion, and non-GAAP net income surged 461% to $6.12 per diluted share. Demand for artificial intelligence (AI) compute and networking products was the driving force behind those stellar numbers, reflected by 427% sales growth in the data-center product category.

Growth will inevitably slow at some point, but Grand View Research estimates that sales across AI hardware, software, and services will compound at 37% annually through 2030. Nvidia is well positioned to benefit due to its technological prowess and broad product portfolio. The company is best known for its graphics processing units (GPUs), but Nvidia actually builds entire AI data centers, and it has recently branched into subscription software and cloud services.

CEO Jensen Huang explained that advantage on the most recent earnings call. “We literally build the entire data center, and we can monitor everything,

Read More

1 High-Growth E-Commerce Stock to Buy Now and Hold Forever

1 High-Growth E-Commerce Stock to Buy Now and Hold Forever

Amazon is one of the best-performing stocks of all time. The e-commerce and technology giant is up over 1,000x since going public by taking advantage of the huge consumer shift from in-person to online shopping (among other things).

It is still a great business, but at a market capitalization of $1.9 trillion it is highly unlikely to replicate the returns of the last couple of decades. This may be disappointing for new investors who have missed the boat on most of Amazon’s gains. But what if I told you investors could own shares in the next Amazon out of East Asia?

Enter Coupang (NYSE: CPNG). The South Korean e-commerce giant is taking its home country by storm and expanding to new markets. Here’s why it could be a once-in-a-generation investment opportunity at today’s price.

The Amazon of South Korea

Founded in 2010 as a Groupon clone, Coupang pivoted to copying Amazon‘s business model but catered to the South Korean market. It has a lot of similarities to Amazon’s retail operations — a subscription membership, vertically integrated shipping, video streaming — as well as things that help it win in the small Asian country. For example, it allows customers to leave reusable return boxes outside their doors to return packages, which are picked up by Coupang drivers.

It is these types of customer value propositions that have elevated Coupang as a leading e-commerce platform in South Korea. Last quarter, it generated $7.1 billion in revenue, up 23% year over year on a foreign currency neutral basis and excluding its acquisition of Farfetch. With the growth of its third-party marketplace for other e-commerce retailers, gross profit is growing much quicker and was up 27% last quarter excluding Farfetch.

These growth rates are much faster than the entire e-commerce market in

Read More

Is Spotify Technology Stock Outpacing Its Business Services Peers This Year?

Is Spotify Technology Stock Outpacing Its Business Services Peers This Year?

Is Spotify Technology Stock Outpacing Its Business Services Peers This Year?

The Business Services group has plenty of great stocks, but investors should always be looking for companies that are outperforming their peers. Spotify (NYSE:SPOT) is a stock that can certainly grab the attention of many investors, but do its recent returns compare favorably to the sector as a whole? A quick glance at the company’s year-to-date performance in comparison to the rest of the Business Services sector should help us answer this question.

Spotify is one of 315 individual stocks in the Business Services sector. Collectively, these companies sit at #2 in the Zacks Sector Rank. The Zacks Sector Rank gauges the strength of our 16 individual sector groups by measuring the average Zacks Rank of the individual stocks within the groups.

The Zacks Rank emphasizes earnings estimates and estimate revisions to find stocks with improving earnings outlooks. This system has a long record of success, and these stocks tend to be on track to beat the market over the next one to three months. Spotify is currently sporting a Zacks Rank of #1 (Strong Buy).

Within the past quarter, the Zacks Consensus Estimate for SPOT’s full-year earnings has moved 33.9% higher. This shows that analyst sentiment has improved and the company’s earnings outlook is stronger.

Our latest available data shows that SPOT has returned about 61.3% since the start of the calendar year. Meanwhile, stocks in the Business Services group have gained about 7.4% on average. This means that Spotify is performing better than its sector in terms of year-to-date returns.

Another Business Services stock, which has outperformed the sector so far this year, is Inter & Co. Inc. (INTR). The stock has returned 10.1% year-to-date.

Over the past three months, Inter & Co. Inc.’s consensus EPS estimate for the current year has increased 6.6%. The stock currently has

Read More

A Financially Independent Stock Trader Shares 2024 Investment Advice

A Financially Independent Stock Trader Shares 2024 Investment Advice

Erik Smolinski is fascinated by markets.

“I watch them all the time,” the 33-year-old investor told Business Insider.

Since he started trading as a teen in 2007, he’s only posted two negative years: his first two years. Between 2018 and 2022, he returned 24.6% on average, which BI verified by looking at screenshots of his summary statements. The S&P 500 index averaged nearly 12% over the same period.

His strongest year was 2023 when his return on invested capital was 243%. “The actual total return on the account for 2023 was 118%,” noted Smolinski, who attributes the triple-digit return to finding “distinct arbitrage opportunities.”

Active trading isn’t for everyone, and experts agree that the everyday investor looking to build long-term wealth should stick with a less risky passive investing strategy.

Smolinski, however, prefers the active approach. The financially independent Marine vet has time to study the market — and is genuinely curious. He uses resources like thinkorswim, Financial Juice, Benzinga, and Barchart.com.

“But most of the research I’m doing is done through my own dataset,” said Smolinski, who procures stock market data from Cboe and queries it in Python. “I essentially create a data stack that I can test ideas with.”

How he’s investing in 2024: Betting on small caps

According to Smolinski, “We’re in a market scenario that has the potential to provide life-changing, generational wealth.”

The way he sees it, the Fed is eventually going to pivot to cutting rates after hiking them aggressively in recent years and then keeping them high to fight inflation. That would be great for small-cap stocks, which are conventionally more desirable when rates fall because they are more sensitive to domestic borrowing costs and consumer spending.

“I would bet dollars to donuts, small caps are going to skyrocket,”

Read More

1 Hidden Catalyst That Could Ignite Shopify Stock

1 Hidden Catalyst That Could Ignite Shopify Stock
online shopping

Image supply: Getty Illustrations or photos

Written by Chris MacDonald at The Motley Idiot Canada

Shopify (TSX:Store) is just one of the biggest e-commerce system suppliers in the earth and 1 of the greatest-expansion shares on the Canadian inventory market. Due to the fact its decline in 2022, the business has witnessed substantial growth in the market place, with shares of Shopify stock roughly tripling off their lows.

That stated, I consider there is plenty additional upside wherever that arrived from. Here’s the one concealed catalyst I believe investors must be focusing on when it will come to Shopify ideal now.

Intercontinental, newborn

Shopify’s main supplying is very well-known in the North American market, with an outstanding penetration charge of all over 15% in its main marketplace. The company’s e-commerce platform gives regular and stable funds flows by way of transaction costs, with a escalating software program-as-a-services small business model that provides the steadiness prolonged-expression development buyers request.

The issue is, even though expansion may possibly gradual in the company’s North American market, there is a crystal clear prospect for outsized expansion in extra worldwide markets. Shopify’s international expansion strategy isn’t essentially a secret — the organization has been growing into new markets for some time. Nonetheless, as the corporation pursues further partnerships and development strategies in many BRICS nations, I consider prime- and base-line advancement could accelerate quicker than the market place indicates.

Financials glance stable

Last yr, Shopify brought in a whopping $7.1 billion of income, symbolizing a rise of 26% on a 12 months-in excess of-12 months foundation. Tailwinds from ongoing e-commerce expansion and potent overall performance from the company’s subscription solutions section drove these effects.

On the base line, gross earnings of $3.5 billion is remarkable, signalling total margins of about 50%. With all

Read More