12/26/12 – Today, Amazon’s stock price fell by 3.8% to $248.63 a share based on declining holiday sales across the retail sector. In addition, Amazon stock (AMZN) took a hit based on accusations from Netflix that Amazon.com was to blame for outages that impacted millions of Netflix customers on Christmas Eve.
MasterCard SpendingPulse (TM) released figures that showed retail holiday sales falling below expectations. Analysts had expected a 3-4% increase in 2012, but SpendingPulse reported a rise of only 0.7%. This report caused AMZN and other retail stocks to decline across the board.
Amazon’s stock price was faced with additional pressure based on accusations from Netflix. On Monday, the day before Christmas, millions of Netflix customers settled in for what many consider a traditional movie night. But to their chagrin and dismay as reflected on their Twitter tweets and Facebook postings, Netflix was down and remain down throughout the night. The issue was not resolved until Tuesday afternoon.
Today, Netflix, Inc. is placing the blame squarely on Amazon. As part of doing business, Netflix has outsourced its content delivery to Amazon.com and uses Amazon’s cloud delivery services to stream videos and other online content to its 30 million members. Netflix stated that a major outage at one of Amazon's service centers (in Virginia) resulted in Netflix users not being able to stream movies and TV shows.
AMZN stock quote shows a 52wk range of $167 – $264 a share and the stock has risen by 44.46% year to date. With such a huge increase in the stock price, it’ll make sense for the stock to take a bigger hit than its peers as hedge funds and institutional investors book profits before year end and as investors continue to fret about the fiscal cliff.
Below is a chart showing AMZN’s year to date 44% rise
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