The wild but profitable ride that’s been Amazon stock (Irrelevant Investor)
The Irrelevant Investor blog written by Michael Batnick did a great piece about Amazon stock’s performance since its IPO and hindsight bias.
In a nutshell the stock has returned 38,155% since its IPO, but it is very unlikely an investor would have held onto the stock over that time period. Every year over the past 20 years the stock had intra-year declines, some substantial, so substantial that in many years you would experience 40% or greater declines.
To make matters worse, over one three-year period, the stock was down 95%. Yet there are many people who now say how obvious it was that Amazon was going to change retail.
That is easy to say with 20/20 hindsight, but most investors would not have been able to ride the Amazon roller-coaster without getting tossed at some point.
