Amazon stock hit its highest closing level in more than two years

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Amazon briefly overtook Alphabet Inc.

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Google

As the third-largest US company by market capitalization last week, although it has since fallen to fourth place. However, the recent momentum for Amazon shares has been enough to help the company maintain its place in the top four even as Nvidia Corp.

NVDA

Nibbling in his wake.

Alphabet ended Friday's session with a market cap of $1.86 trillion, while Amazon was valued at $1.81 trillion and Nvidia was valued at $1.78 trillion.

Wall Street had a mixed reaction to Big Tech's earnings this quarter, but Amazon's results were among those that were well received.

See also: Amazon says “magic words.” They spurred a $130 billion increase in market cap.

“Overall, the implications that kept a lid on AMZN shares — the e-commerce slowdown in 2021, the e-commerce slowdown and margin pressure in 2022 and the AWS slowdown in 2023 — will dissipate throughout 2024,” UBS analyst Stephen Go wrote in a note to Clients post those results.

The company has been a big driver of earnings growth for the consumer discretionary sector of the S&P 500, with its quarterly earnings per share rising to $1 in the fourth quarter from 3 cents a year earlier. The consumer discretionary sector is now expected to post 33% EPS growth for the fourth quarter, according to FactSet, but without Amazon, that could swing to a decline of about 1%.