AMZN - Amazon.com, Inc.
| Previous close | 1,776.12 |
| Open | 1,792.89 |
| Bid | 1,790.00 x 800 |
| Ask | 1,791.80 x 800 |
| Day's range | 1,784.72 - 1,802.46 |
| 52-week range | 1,307.00 - 2,050.50 |
| Volume | 3,051,559 |
| Avg. volume | 3,701,800 |
| Market cap | 886.705B |
| Beta (3Y monthly) | 1.58 |
| PE ratio (TTM) | 74.37 |
| EPS (TTM) | 24.10 |
| Earnings date | 23 Oct. 2019 - 28 Oct. 2019 |
| Forward dividend & yield | N/A (N/A) |
| Ex-dividend date | N/A |
| 1y target est | 2,261.27 |
- Yahoo Finance
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- Bloomberg
Trump’s Dinner Guest on Friday Will Be Apple’s CEO Tim Cook
(Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly lashed out at technology giants and their leaders, announced on Friday evening that he would be dining with Apple Inc. Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook.“Having dinner tonight with Tim Cook of Apple,” Trump, who is staying at his golf resort in Bedminster, New Jersey, wrote on Twitter. “They will be spending vast sums of money in the U.S. Great!”He did not elaborate, and Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the meeting.Heads of other major technology companies, including Amazon.com Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Facebook Inc. have not fared as well in the president’s tweets and public remarks.He and his political allies have made unsupported claims that social media companies muzzle conservative views. Trump has assailed Amazon for edging out brick-and-mortar retailers and criticized its founder Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post.Pressure on tech companies is increasing in Washington as congressional Republicans examine accusations of bias against conservatives; Democrats in the House conduct an antitrust inquiry and officials at the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission divvy up oversight of Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon.Earlier this week, FTC Chairman Joe Simons said in an interview that he wouldn’t let Trump’s complaints about the size and political inclinations of large technology platforms affect his agency’s decisions.Cook visited the White House in June to discuss the Trump administration’s efforts to develop job training programs that meet the changing demands of U.S. employers. The meeting was part of the American Workforce Policy Advisory Board, a working group that includes many corporate leaders. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and Trump’s daughter and adviser Ivanka Trump unveiled the initiative earlier this year.\--With assistance from Alistair Barr.To contact the reporter on this story: John Harney in Washington at jharney2@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Kevin Whitelaw at kwhitelaw@bloomberg.net, John HarneyFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
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Nvidia Impresses Investors With A Bright Future Ahead
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Stock Market News for Aug 16, 2019
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EBAY or AMZN: Which Is the Better Value Stock Right Now?
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The Zacks Analyst Blog Highlights: Macy's, Wal-Mart, Nordstrom, Kohl's and Amazon
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The 1 Key Number You Should Focus On at UPS
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- Bloomberg
Pentagon’s $10 Billion Brain Is Frozen by a Contracting Scandal
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- In the latest twist in the fraught competition for the Department of Defense’s $10 billion cloud-computing project, the Pentagon Inspector General’s Office announced a new investigation into whether there have been improprieties or corruption in the contracting process thus far. This probe, described to me as a very significant undertaking by Pentagon insiders, will complement a review already being conducted by new Secretary of Defense Mark Esper.The cloud project is formally known as the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure or, in a nod to “Star Wars” geeks, JEDI. It would provide a single managerial system and a single repository for storage of the department’s incomprehensibly vast data streams. As the controversy hit, the contract was reportedly about to be awarded, with the final competitors being Amazon Web Services Inc (the heavy, heavy favorite) and Microsoft Corp.The twin investigations were spurred by pressure from three sources: disgruntled competitors who felt they were out of the running; Congressional actors representing districts and states from where those competitors have a presence; and the Oval Office itself. President Donald Trump said in mid-July that he intended to review the JEDI contracting after receiving “tremendous complaints” about the process from “some of the great companies in the world,” including IBM, Microsoft and Oracle – each of which bid on the JEDI contract.None of this, other than direct interference by the commander in chief, is particularly out of the ordinary for big defense acquisitions, given the byzantine procurement process in the Pentagon. As a newly selected one-star rear admiral in 2000, I was assigned to manage a complex agency-wide telecommunications contract that included creating a new constellation of satellites. By the time it was finally awarded, I had long transferred out of the Pentagon. And in 2013, as I was a grizzled four-star Admiral about to finish up my career, I was still wondering why the satellite constellation wasn’t yet fully operational. The short answer is that at the nexus of big money, political influence and uncertain technology, delays are a certainty.All of this begs the questions of why the U.S. military is pursuing this system, and how it can be brought on line rapidly – by whomever eventually wins the contract.JEDI will be an absolutely vital part of America’s future warfighting capability, especially in the increasingly complex new 5G environment. At heart, the vast cloud would allow a much more efficient information-technology system, replacing the hodgepodge of thousands of hand-tooled, inefficient networks that exist today. This is especially critical for the military, where so many personnel transfer every two to three years, often taking with them a hands-on knowledge of an individual network or complex of software. For a vast organization like the Department of Defense -- the largest “company” in the world – JEDI’s efficiency at scale will be crucial to optimizing expensive resources and operating efficiently.It’s not just about efficiency, though: JEDI should vastly improve resiliency and security. Instead of individual networks and organizations backing up their information locally, everything is stored in a much more defendable cloud structure - just as your personal data and photographs likely exist in the Microsoft or Apple Inc clouds today. The data can be seamlessly transferred, even in the intense crucible of combat. Cybersecurity experts tell us that there is great strength in reducing the number of individual portals that can be attacked and overcome; streamlining and unifying the defenses of the entire department make sense. This reduction of “threat surfaces” is crucial.Finally, from an operator’s perspective, there is great allure in one-stop shopping to stream data (a sort of military Netflix,), to record and store it, to create simple systems to “patch” software, and to build an infrastructure that permits constant monitoring of the entire department’s networks. Lieutenant General Jack Shanahan, head of the Pentagon’s Artificial Intelligence Center, commented recently on the operational capabilities necessary for the emerging era of great power competition, with China in particular.“Imagine the speed of operations in a fight in the Pacific, where you just do not have time to figure out, ‘How do I get my data, clean my data, move it from point A to point B.’” Shanahan said. “If I’m a warfighter, I want as much data as you could possibly give me. Let my algorithms sort through it at machine speed. It’s really hard for me to do that without an enterprise cloud solution.” His comments were echoed by the department’s chief information officer, Dana Deasy, in a rare on-the-record co-briefing to the press they held last week.In order to move quickly to find efficiencies, create new resiliency, and provide a single point of contact for all IT operations, the Department of Defense needs to thoroughly but quickly complete these investigations. If there are real instances of malfeasance, they should be uncovered and the perpetrators punished forthwith. Frankly, Secretary Esper has an unattractive set of options, including starting the competition over; pressing forward to award despite the external pressure; or searching for some middle ground that may satisfy nobody. Whether he can power through all the sand in the gears here will be the first test of his leadership abilities, and will be among the most important he will face.In the likely scenario that all this smoke reveals not much fire but rather disgruntled competitors and political angst (and a strong component of anti-Amazon influence from the White House, where Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos is despised), Esper should press through to a contract award as soon as is legally appropriate. Warfighting in the 21st century will be “brain on brain” combat, and a large, singular cloud structure is the gray matter the U.S. military needs.To contact the author of this story: James Stavridis at jstavridis@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: Tobin Harshaw at tharshaw@bloomberg.netThis column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.James Stavridis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is a retired U.S. Navy admiral and former supreme allied commander of NATO, and dean emeritus of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He is also an operating executive consultant at the Carlyle Group and chairs the board of counselors at McLarty Associates.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinion©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
- Bloomberg
U.S. Allies Feel Strain of Trump's Friendship
(Bloomberg) -- Want to receive this post in your inbox every day? Sign up for the Balance of Power newsletter, and follow Bloomberg Politics on Twitter and Facebook for more.U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s new government is finding that President Donald Trump’s friendship tends to come at a price, even for the strongest of U.S. allies.Two U.S. officials told Bloomberg yesterday that Washington was gravely disappointed by a court decision in the autonomous U.K. territory Gibraltar ordering the release of the Iranian oil tanker Grace 1.The U.S. is trying to get the decision reversed and has threatened penalties against any entity that does business with the tanker, which was seized by British commandos on July 4. Gibraltar officials say it was en route with oil to Syria in breach of European Union sanctions. The court ruled that it wasn't.The stakes for Britain are high. Iran still holds a British-flagged tanker and has hinted it may release it if the Grace 1 goes free.And Johnson, who has pledged to take the U.K. out of the EU on Oct. 31, badly needs U.S. support for a post-Brexit trade deal.Trump is increasingly putting pressure on allies on issues ranging from Iran to rejecting cooperation with Chinese technology companies such as Huawei to urging Israel to ban the visit of U.S. lawmakers.That risks creating a tangle of smaller disputes and undermining broader global interests such as security and trade.Global HeadlinesReversing course | Israel announced it will allow Rashida Tlaib to visit her family on a humanitarian trip, a day after it said Tlaib and fellow Muslim U.S. Congresswoman Ilhan Omar would be barred from an official visit this weekend because of their support for a boycott of the country. The travel ban was announced shortly after Trump tweeted that the two Democrats — whom he has targeted in recent weeks — “hate Israel & all Jewish people.”Counterpoint | Omar and Dean Phillips are freshman U.S. House Democrats representing districts in Minnesota’s Twin Cities region, but that’s where the similarities end. Phillips is urging some party lawmakers — including Omar and other members of “the squad” of newly-elected progressive women — to slow down on calls to impeach Trump, stop sniping on Twitter and cut some deals with Republicans. He told Erik Wasson he didn’t get to Congress by being a “rabble-rouser.”In limbo | Voters in Argentina face at least 10 more weeks of uncertainty to see if the market meltdown in the wake of Sunday's primary had any basis in reality. Campaigning is under way for the first round of the presidential elections on Oct. 27, and few believe incumbent Mauricio Macri or Alberto Fernandez — who led strongly in the primary — will work together to allay the risk of more turmoil. The upshot is no immediate end in sight to Argentina’s parlous economic and financial situation.Rescue plan | Facing crippling power cuts and severe food shortages, Finance Minister Mthuli Ncube has a plan to end Zimbabwe's two-decade stand-off with international creditors in a bid to halt economic collapse. The Cambridge-educated Ncube outlined in an interview ambitious proposals to sell bonds, privatize state companies, and settle its debt.Amazon dispute | Brazil’s president rebuffed European criticism of his environmental policies after Norway and Germany froze millions of dollars in financial aid to an Amazon rainforest preservation fund. Jair Bolsonaro accused the global elite of indifference to deforestation, arguing that their interest is motivated by the natural riches of the region, and said Germany should understand that Brazil is under new management.What to WatchHong Kong's protesters will stage new demonstrations this weekend amid growing concern that China will send in troops after state media showed video footage of paramilitary police massing just across the mainland border. The head of Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd., the most visible corporate victim of the protest, also resigned. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s decision to scrap Kashmir’s autonomy after imposing an unprecedented communications lockdown is set to be tested today at the United Nations Security Council after India’s top court deferred a case calling on the government to lift restrictions in place for 12 days. Estonia's prime minister rebuked his nationalist coalition partner after its botched attempt to oust the head of police intensified a dispute that has pushed the squabbling government to the brink of collapse.And finally ... Ever the property developer, Trump may have his eye on his biggest possible acquisition yet: Greenland. According to the Wall Street Journal, the president wants to buy the ice-covered north Atlantic island. Denmark, which owns it, isn’t sure whether the offer is a joke, and isn't selling in any case. But the idea is being taken seriously in some corners in the U.S., which has built several military bases on the world’s largest island, and it will be in focus when Trump makes his first formal visit to Denmark next month. \--With assistance from Kathleen Hunter.To contact the author of this story: Marc Champion in London at mchampion7@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: Karl Maier at kmaier2@bloomberg.net, Rosalind MathiesonMichael WinfreyFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
- Financial Times
Amazon targeted on Chinese social media for Hong Kong T-shirts
Amazon has come under fire in China over the online retailer’s response to criticism that T-shirts supporting anti-government protests in Hong Kong were sold on its platform. Global Times, a nationalist state-backed tabloid, on Thursday accused Amazon of challenging China’s sovereignty by allowing the sale of T-shirts with slogans like “Free Hong Kong Democracy Now”, written in English, or “Go Hong Kong”, written in traditional Chinese characters. Amazon’s responded that it “accepted and respected” the “one country, two systems” framework, adding: “Every country where we operate has different laws, and we will continue to respect those local laws where we do business,” according to Chinese state media reports.
- Bloomberg
AI Startup Plans IPO at Value of Over $1 Billion -- in China
(Bloomberg) -- The promise of artificial intelligence has yet to translate into big business. Now Kai-Fu Lee, a prominent venture capitalist in China and founder of Sinovation Ventures, says his firm’s new startup should be able to reach $100 million in revenue next year and go public the year after.AInnovation, established in March 2018, develops artificial intelligence products for companies in industries such as retail, manufacturing, and finance. Its customers include Mars Inc., Carlsberg A/S, Nestle SA, Foxconn Technology Group, China Everbright Bank Co. and Postal Savings Bank of China Co.Chief Executive Officer Hocking Xu, a veteran of International Business Machines Corp. and SAP SE, has hired staff that work with traditional companies to figure out how to take advantage of AI in their operations. AInnovation is on track to hit $100 million in revenue within two years of its founding, the fastest pace yet for such a startup, Lee said.“We took the approach of ‘Let’s take some of the best business people and let’s target the industries which need AI the most’,” he said.Lee figures AInnovation will be able to go public in less than two years at a valuation of $1 billion to $2 billion. The firm has raised about $70 million so far from Sinovation, CICC ALPHA and Chengwei Capital. Since the company was funded with yuan, it would most likely list domestically, either on China’s new NASDAQ-like Star market, or on the country’s ChiNext.For retail companies, AInnovation sells products including a smart vending machine that opens with facial recognition and software that monitors retail shelves with image recognition. It’s created computer vision technology that detects defects on the production line for manufacturers and underwriting software and natural language processing technology for financial firms. There’s a large market in particular for technology to catch flaws early in the manufacturing process, said Jeffrey Ding, a researcher with Oxford’s Center for the Governance of AI. That effort “aligns with the Chinese government’s priorities to upgrade smart manufacturing capabilities to compete with countries like Germany and Switzerland,” he said in an email.The former president of Google China, Kai-Fu Lee founded Sinovation Ventures in 2009. It manages more than $2 billion across seven funds in U.S. and Chinese currencies. It holds shares in more than 300 companies, most of which are in China. Its investments include autonomous driving company Momenta, consumer AI chip firm Horizon Robotics Inc. and bitcoin mining and AI chip company Bitmain Technologies Ltd.In artificial intelligence, “we’re still at a very early stage in the commercialization,” Lee said. “We’re still at the equivalent of early internet portals, back when everybody was using Yahoo and there wasn’t even a Google, Amazon, or Facebook.”Global economic ructions, however, may present short-term challenges. Venture deals in China have been plummeting as investors pull back amid escalating trade tensions and slowing economic growth. The value of investments in the country tumbled 77% to $9.4 billion in the second quarter from a year earlier.“In an economy that’s slowing down, everything slows, including venture capital. There will definitely be a shakeout,” Lee said. “The positive side is that if the economy is challenging, and valuations are down, it’s a good time for us to go shopping.”Sinovation was one of the first Chinese venture capital firms with a presence in the U.S. With the trade war and the Trump administration’s tighter scrutiny of foreign investments, the firm has scaled back investments and no longer has an office in the U.S., Lee said, adding that investments in America have always been a small fraction of its overall investments.“In the long term, it’s a pity if we have to cause a total separation of two countries because one could argue that AI got to where it got because the whole world has been able to work together.”(Updates with analyst’s comment in the 9th paragraph)To contact the reporter on this story: Selina Wang in China at swang533@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Jillian Ward at jward56@bloomberg.net, Peter Elstrom, Colum MurphyFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
- Financial Times
Antonio Banderas on playing Almodóvar, Pain and Glory and leaving Hollywood
It’s no exaggeration to say that Antonio Banderas has spent 37 years preparing for his latest role. In Pain and Glory the Spanish actor plays Salvador Mallo, a thinly veiled facsimile of his close friend and longtime collaborator, director Pedro Almodóvar, with whom he first worked on 1982’s Labyrinth of Passion. The saturnine character of Salva is determined to a large degree by the litany of ailments from which he suffers (many of them shared by Almodóvar), and Banderas, though in enviable shape for a man of 59, is himself now no stranger to health scares, having suffered a heart attack in 2017.
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Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Is Buying Amazon Stock. Should You?
Should investors take advantage of Amazon stock's recent pullback?
- Motley Fool
Will This Be Amazon's "Next Game of Thrones"?
Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time" series is coming soon to an Amazon Prime Video account near you.
- Bloomberg
Brazil’s Bolsonaro Defiant as Norway Freezes Rainforest Cash
(Bloomberg) -- Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro dismissed European leaders’ concerns about his government’s environmental policies after Norway followed Germany and froze millions of dollars in financial aid to an Amazon rainforest preservation fund.Bolsonaro accused the global elite of indifference to Amazonian deforestation, in comments to reporters in Brasilia on Thursday, arguing their interest was motivated by the natural riches of the region. Norway is not in a position to lecture Brazil and Germany’s Angela Merkel should understand that the South American country is under new management, Bolsonaro said. The suspended cash transfer should be used to “reforest Germany” instead, he added.Earlier in the day Norway had announced the suspension of a $33 million payment to the Amazon fund. Germany had previously said it would halt a contribution of 35 million euros. Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon soared to alarming levels in July as an area almost three times the size of New York City was cleared in the jungle last month alone, according to the alert system of Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, known as INPE. Bolsonaro dismissed the data in a press conference, fired the director of INPE, and said that the country has become a victim of a hostile narrative.“We are losing the information war regarding the Amazon rainforest,” he said. “Brazil will truly take off once we manage to sensibly extract the riches there.”The Brazilian president said that he had made his opinions clear to other world leaders. “I have said to Angela Merkel and Macron in a polite but firm manner that we will not be subservient anymore,” he said.To contact the reporter on this story: Mario Sergio Lima in Brasilia Newsroom at mlima11@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Juan Pablo Spinetto at jspinetto@bloomberg.net, Bruce DouglasFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
- Motley Fool
Don’t Catch Falling Knives: The JCPenney Story
The retailer may well be too far gone to save, and its ill-defined turnaround plan won’t change that.
- Bloomberg
Facebook Tells Chat Users Nothing About Human Listeners
(Bloomberg) -- Facebook Inc. this week confirmed that it ran a program to allow contractors to listen to and transcribe some users’ audio clips. The social network said that the only people who were affected were those who agreed to have their audio messages transcribed.That makes it sound like users agreed to have their chats read by third parties. But based on a look at the Messenger permissions pop-up dialogue box, they didn’t.In the Messenger mobile app, as soon as someone sends a voice message, they get a prompt asking, “Turn on Voice to Text in this chat?” Above the “No” and “Yes” buttons, Facebook describes the option: “Display text of voice clips you send and receive. You can control whether text is visible to you for each chat.”There is no mention of human involvement. Even in a separate information page in the app dedicated to understanding Voice to Text, Facebook explains that users can turn it off for each chat, and prompts people to use it more. “Voice to Text uses machine learning,” it says. “The more you use this feature, the more Voice to Text can help you.” There’s no explanation that machine learning doesn’t just involve software code.Companies including Apple Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Google have been relying on humans to check and improve their artificial intelligence systems -- they’re just not telling their users about it. That’s a critical lapse at a time when all of the companies -- especially Facebook -- are facing regulatory scrutiny for privacy lapses. The Irish Data Protection Commissioner, which enforces European Union privacy laws, said it was looking into Facebook’s transcription practices.“AI just isn’t at the level yet where it can interpret human conversation,” meaning the companies need to rely on monitoring to help train the systems, said Jennifer King, director of consumer privacy at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society. “But the big issue from my perspective is the non-disclosure. Users clearly don’t know it’s happening.”The report on Facebook’s human transcription program raised the ire of U.S. lawmakers, some of whom were already calling for stronger privacy protections than those imposed by a $5 billion settlement with the Federal Trade Commission approved last month. Senator Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, said the latest revelation about Facebook’s audio collection “is yet further proof that consumers’ expectations of how their data is collected and used radically differ from what companies like Facebook are actually doing.”Some privacy lawyers suggested the lack of disclosure ran afoul of the company’s settlement with the FTC. That agreement, which resolved known conduct before June 12, bars misrepresentations by Facebook about user privacy controls, third-party access to user data and how information is collected, used and disclosed."Absent some other disclosure to users regarding the human listening, I do believe it is likely this is a violation of the order in the case," said Mark McCreary, chief privacy officer at law firm Fox Rothschild LLP.(Updates with comments from privacy lawyer in final paragraphs.)To contact the reporter on this story: Sarah Frier in San Francisco at sfrier1@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Jillian Ward at jward56@bloomberg.net, Andrew PollackFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
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3 Tech Stocks for Dividend Investors to Buy Amid Yield Curve & Trade Fears
Check out these 3 dividend paying tech stocks to buy as yield curve and trade war fears heat up...
- Zacks
Top Ranked Tech ETFs in Focus
Technology is still the best performing sector this year despite trade tensions and global growth concerns
