If Amazon’s gains hold up through the close, the stock will have added $92 billion to its market capitalization in a single day. That’s the equivalent of adding a 3M, a UPS, or a Lowe’s. Or if you prefer, it’s like adding GM, Ford, and Harley, the entire auto manufacturing industry in the S&P 500. Maybe Amazon and its investors have figured out a way to defy the law of large numbers. As for profitability in the core business, that still looks pretty elusive.
Bloomberg’s Brandon Kochkodin reports:
The largest U.S. e-commerce company saw its shares jump by more than 10% after Thursday’s earnings report crushed Wall Street estimates. If that gain stands through Friday’s close of trading, the company could see its market capitalization surge by more than $90 billion, and push the total value above $1 trillion — a level the stock has flirted with intraday, but never held through the market close.
That’d be the biggest single-day gain on record for a U.S. company, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The previous record was $78 billion, set by Alphabet Inc. on July 26, after its shares surged on its own strong results and a $25 billion share-buyback program.
To be sure, with markets near all-time highs, marks such as this are bound to be challenged. But it’s also not an everyday event when one of the largest companies in the world gains 10% or more in a single session. Over the last five years, the six companies in the S&P 500 Index with current market caps exceeding $500 billion have had just 10 such days combined. Today would be the 11th such occurrence, and the fourth time Amazon has done so, the most of any company in the group.
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