Amazon Performance

Now that Jeff Bezos is stepping down as CEO of Amazon, the focus is on the history of the company under his tenure. I think one of the best lessons Amazon has taught us is to be patient investors. Let's look at the history of the share price to explain why.

The company listed at $1.73 in June 1997. It had a great start in the dot-com era and by June 1998 it reached $10 a share. Things got even better from there. In 1999 it reached $100 a share by April, only to be back at $50 a share in June of 1999. It breached $113 at the peak of the dot-com bubble. By March 2001 it crashed to $6 a share. Ouch.

If you had bought Amazon at the peak dot-com level it would have taken you nine years to break even in October 2009. The share price did nothing for nearly a decade.

The next period was a good one for the stock. It went from $100 a share in 2009 to $2 000 a share in September 2018. After hitting that $2 000 mark it went to sleep again for two years until global lockdowns pushed the price above $3 000 a share for the first time last year.

Had you bought $10 000 worth of Amazon when it started trading at $1.73 in 2007, those shares would now be worth $20 293 580, but it was a long and volatile ride. Nothing comes easy in the stock market.