Amazon (AMZN) STOCK AMZN STOCK
Amazon

In 1997 when Amazon first filed for its initial public offering, the company was just three years old and had no clear path to profitability. It faced a growing list of competitors that included Simon & Schuster and Barnes & Noble, each of which was already selling books online.

Amazon IPO’d on May 15, 1997, trading on the NASDAQ under the symbol of AMZN at a price of $18 a share. On IPO day the stock price rose and closed at $23.50 putting the company at a value of $560 million. Taking the split-adjusted close of $1.96, the stock price has multiplied almost 500 times since.

When it comes to Amazon’s stock split history, the first stock split occurred on the 2nd of June 1998. This was a 2-1 split. Amazon’s next stock split was a 3-1 split on January 5th, 1999. There was one more stock split for Amazon stock that year, as 2-1 stock split on September 2nd.

Although Amazon is a juggernaut of a stock now. It has quite the tumultuous history. Amazon stock first broke $100 dollars in 1999 but after the the tech bubble burst the stock price did not reach triple figures again until 10 years later. The stock suffered a 94% drop after the $106.69 high in December 1999, crashing to a low of $5.97 in January 2001. Despite recovering in the next few years and getting back to a stock price of over $50 the stock crashed back again down to $26.07 in 2006. Despite a positive growth period, Amazon stock had another blip during the 2008 crash, losing 60% year over year. In 2016, the stock price again had some significant drops during the year due to disappointing earnings results. But each time Amazon bounced back, hitting all all time highs and continues on its seemingly unstoppable rise.

On the 20th anniversary of the IPO Amazon stock closed at $961.35, giving the company a market value of about $466.2 billion. That's 490 times its split-adjusted stock price.

Few investors could have foreseen that it would gain about 50,000% in the two decades after its initial public offering. One thousand dollars invested at the closing price on Amazon's IPO day would be worth over nearly half a million dollars 20 years later. Of course one investor who has been there during the entire history of Amazon stock is Jeff Bezos. Putting him on path to become the world’s richest person. For context in 2016, Bezos sold $1.4 billion of Amazon stock in total. Yet in 2017 because Amazon's shares have run up sharply in the past year the Amazon CEO sold about $941 million of Amazon stock in a three day period, as part of a scheduled sell. That kind of return escaped many analysts and even investors as seasoned as Warren Buffett, the Berkshire Hathaway CEO who recently said he was "too dumb to realize what was going to happen."