Amazon is ending the year on a low note after losing nearly half of its value in 2022.
Video Transcript
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SEANA SMITH: All right, well, my pick today is Amazon. Certainly has been a brutal year for the stock. It’s lost just about half of its value in 2022, with hundreds of billions of dollars wiped from its market cap. Now, its market cap is now around $844 billion. Putting this into perspective, though, that’s down from $1.7 trillion.
This year marks the second worst year ever for Amazon, second only to the 80% drop that we saw in the stock during the dot-com crash. Shares today are trading just around $83 a share. That’s about $1 higher from that 52-week low that Amazon hit earlier this week.
Now Amazon, though, certainly is not alone in the massive drop. 2022 has been a very tough year for a number of the larger-cap tech names, and Meta being one of those names, Jared, off just about 64%. So rising rate environment, recession looming, questions whether or not we are going to see the tide turn for tech next year. We heard from a number of our market guests, though. They’re still advising to stay away from the sector, at least for now.
JARED BLIKRE: I was just reading Professor Galloway’s column for the weekend here And guess what? He likes big tech next year because of all the layoffs. Guess what? They’re getting rid of tons, billions of dollars; worth of headcount.
The Twitter lesson that a lot of these tech execs are learning or having to notice is that you actually can run a platform, not necessarily well, based on cutting 2/3 of the staff. I think that’s what they cut there. So I think, yeah, we could definitely see huge margins and record profits for tech, big tech this year, which means the stock might do well, even though the industry revenue may not be at its breakneck growth pace.
PRAS SUBRAMANIAN: We heard– or I guess read reports about Amazon’s cargo planes being half empty, and they’re selling that cargo space to kind of accommodate that– the air cargo volume. But if I’m an investor in Amazon, I want maybe two things on my wish list, right– buyback, a nice little juicy buyback, and then maybe spin off AWS. Is that going to happen? That could be a nice, nice gain.
SEANA SMITH: Yeah, we’ll see. I don’t know.
PRAS SUBRAMANIAN: I don’t think so, but.
SEANA SMITH: AWS sell their crown jewel, I don’t know if they’d be willing to spin off, but we’ll see. We’ll see.
