About Amazon. If you invested $500 at the IPO pric
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You wouldn't be an Amazon millionaire yet, but that's an amazing return of about 36% compounded annually, or a total return of 113,000%.
Investors who stuck with Amazon through the roller coaster ride of the dot-com bubble around 2000 would have been handsomely rewarded for their patience. The stock soared from a split-adjusted IPO price of $1.50 per share to $106.69 per share on Dec. 10, 1999. From there, it proceeded to fall 96% until it bottomed on Sept. 28, 2001, at $5.97 per share.
It's amazing to think about it, but even if you had bought Amazon shares at the peak of the tech bubble in December 1999, you would still be up more than 1,500% on that investment. It's an important lesson that investors tend to undervalue fast-growing companies with massive opportunities to expand. Just because a stock looks overvalued doesn't mean it is.
From its founding through 2001, Amazon was unprofitable and was bleeding cash as it invested heavily in marketing, technology, and fulfillment to expand. In 2002, the business became free cash flow positive and has remained so every year since.
Free cash flow has always been Bezos' preferred metric for gauging the profitability of the company. In his first letter to shareholders, Bezos stated, "When forced to choose between optimizing the appearance of our GAAP accounting and maximizing the present value of future cash flows, we'll take the cash flows."
Today, Amazon generates more than $20 billion in free cash flow. The growth of Amazon Web Services (AWS) has had a lot to do with increasing profits and free cash flow in recent years. AWS accounted for about two-thirds of the company's operating income in the third quarter of this year.
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