E-commerce giant Amazon.com, Inc. AMZN has been one of the best-performing stocks of the past 20 years thanks to huge growth in market share for e-commerce and expansion into new areas such as the cloud, video games and streaming.
In recent years, Amazon investors had to hold the stock through macroeconomic issues, a global pandemic, the transition of its CEO and a very public divorce of the founder of the company.
What Happened: Jeff Bezos founded Amazon.com as an online bookstore in 1994. Bezos stepped down from the CEO role of the company in 2021 after 27 years of leading the company.
Prior to stepping down from the CEO role, Bezos went through a public break-up and divorce from his now ex-wife MacKenzie Scott. The couple were married for 25 years.
Part of the divorce proceedings saw a settlement that granted Scott 4% ownership of Amazon.com, worth around $38.3 billion at the time.
Scott had been philanthropic over the years and gifted billions of dollars to various charities.
The pressure of the divorce and the large sales of Amazon stock by Scott may have rattled some investors out of the stock.
Here’s a look at how shares of Amazon performed since Bezos got divorced.
Related Link: 5 Things You Might Not Know About Jeff Bezos
Investing $1,000 in AMZN Stock: Bezos and Scott announced their separation in January 2019. The couple finalized their divorce on April 4, 2019.
A $1,000 investment on April 4, 2019, could have purchased 10.94 shares of Amazon, based on a split-adjusted price of $91.44.
The $1,000 investment would be worth $1,168.28 today, based on a price of $106.79 for Amazon shares at the time of writing.
This represented a return of 16.8%. While the return is not Earth-shattering, it showed the company still moved on after the divorce and since Bezos stepped down.
Amazon shares hit an all-time high of $186.12 in July 2021, which was coincidentally around the time that Bezos stepped down from the CEO role. The $1,000 investment would have been worth $2,036.15 at the time, up 103.6%.
To put the investment in comparison, the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust SPY is up 43.5% since April 4, 2019. The ETF tracks the S&P 500, which is considered by many to be a good market indicator.
The hypothetical investment offers several lessons for investors. The divorce of a leading management figure and a new CEO transition can be major events that can spook investors and analysts but sometimes remain non-factors in the long term.
The hypothetical investment hitting gains of 103.6% at all-time high prices could also serve as a reminder to investors that sometimes taking profits on stocks with big returns can be a good idea before market corrections or other issues can hurt stocks.
Photo: Andrii Yalanskyi via Shutterstock
© 2024 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.
Comments
Trade confidently with insights and alerts from analyst ratings, free reports and breaking news that affects the stocks you care about.
