NEW YORK, December 31, 2025, 12:10 ET — Regular session
- Amazon shares fell about 0.5% in midday trade, tracking a softer tone across megacaps.
- Evercore ISI’s Mark Mahaney reiterated a bullish 2026 view, pointing to AWS momentum.
- A U.S. appeals court ruling kept Amazon’s NLRB labor fight in focus heading into 2026.
Amazon.com, Inc. shares dipped on Wednesday, down about 0.5% at $231.44 in midday trading.
The muted move matters now because year-end trading typically brings lighter liquidity, making single-stock moves more sensitive to positioning than to fresh fundamentals.
The broader tape stayed cautious on the final U.S. trading day of 2025, with major indexes edging lower in holiday-thinned volumes and U.S. markets set to close on Thursday for New Year’s Day.
On the catalyst front, Evercore ISI analyst Mark Mahaney called Amazon his “top pick” for 2026 in a client note. “Top pick” is analyst shorthand for a stock expected to outperform peers or the wider market. GuruFocus
Mahaney’s case leans heavily on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud unit and a key profit driver. AWS revenue grew 20% in the third quarter, Reuters reported previously, even as Microsoft’s Azure and Alphabet’s Google Cloud posted faster percentage growth off smaller bases.
Investors are also framing the story around capital expenditures, or capex—money spent on data centers, chips and other long-lived assets. Amazon projected higher capital spending next year in its October results, reflecting the cost of building out AI-related infrastructure.
That makes upcoming updates on AWS capacity, pricing and margins central for traders trying to handicap whether AI demand translates into higher operating profit, not just higher spending.
Legal and labor risks also remain on the radar. A U.S. appeals court this week said it could not hear Amazon’s challenge to the structure of the National Labor Relations Board, a decision that deepened a split among U.S. appeals courts and left the dispute to proceed through the agency process first. The underlying case involves whether Amazon is a “joint employer” of certain contract drivers—language that can widen a company’s responsibilities under U.S. labor law. Reuters
For equity investors, the near-term question is whether these legal battles stay compartmentalized—or begin to influence expectations for labor costs, delivery operations and the pace of automation investment.
Trading desks said price action into the close is likely to be shaped by year-end rebalancing and tax positioning, rather than a decisive change in views on Amazon’s fundamentals.
The next major checkpoint is earnings. Amazon is expected to report quarterly results around Feb. 5, according to Nasdaq and Yahoo Finance earnings calendars, a moment when investors typically focus on AWS growth, advertising trends and management’s outlook for 2026 spending.
With the New Year holiday interrupting trading, investors will be watching whether the first full week of January brings clearer direction in Amazon shares as liquidity normalizes and portfolios reset.
