Diamonds and Dogs

1/31/20

It's an Amazon world we live in. Amazon (AMZN) is up 9% bringing the value of the company to one trillion. Amazon nearly doubled earnings estimates as sales rose 20.8% to $87.44 billion. Sales for Amazon's business responsible for selling data storage and computing power in the cloud grew 34%. Subscription fees surged 32% as more than 150 million shoppers are now Prime members. Plenty of upgrades with price targets as high as $2700 a share. Amazon's market cap is up over 80 billion which is twice the market cap of FedEx and nearly equal to UPS.

Another bad year for Energy. Energy is once again the worst performing sector down 5% this week and 10% for the year. Two oil titans, Exxon Mobil (XOM) and Chevron (CVX) are both down over 3% on earnings. Chevron took a charge for $10 billion to write down assets as they struggle to make money from natural gas.  Exxon, the country's largest oil company, reported its poorest quarterly operating earnings in three years dragged down by slim oil refining margins and a rare loss in its chemicals business. The good news is the companies remain very profitable the dividend yields keep going up. Chevron yields 4.7% and Exxon yields 5.5%.