2. Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN)
Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 252
Up next among the best machine learning stocks to buy now, we have Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AWS), the owner and operator of Amazon Web Services. Amazon Web Services is one of the most widely used cloud platforms for machine learning and deep learning. On September 29, Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) announced that its cloud division, Amazon Web Services, has entered into a strategic agreement with SK Telecom by which the two will jointly develop a new set of computer vision services.
Analysts are bullish on Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN). This September, Truist analyst Youssef Squali revised his price target on Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) to $170 from $180 and maintained a Buy rating on the shares. On September 29, Citi analyst Ronald Josey maintained his Buy rating and $185 price target on Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN).
At the end of Q2 2022, 252 hedge funds were eager on Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) and held stakes worth $30 billion in the company. As of June 30, Fisher Asset Management owns more than 46 million shares of Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) and is the most prominent investor in the company.
Here is what Lakehouse Capital had to say about Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) in its second-quarter 2022 investor letter:
“Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) proved resilient in the face of ongoing macro pressures and delivered a strong quarterly result along with “better-than-feared” guidance for the third quarter. Net sales increased 7% year-on-year (10% constant currency) to $121.2 billion, while operating profit declined 57% to $3.3 billion. The drop in operating profit was attributable not only to external macro factors, such as elevated shipping and fuel costs, but also lower productivity and efficiency costs as a result of some overcapacity on the back of its recent investment cycle. It was pleasing to see that the company has begun to make progress on the more controllable costs, particularly productivity and staffing, with headcount, for example, down almost 100,000 over the quarter. We continue to believe Amazon is well positioned to manage these short-term issues and remains on track to deliver significant profit improvements over the next twelve months.
Management also confirmed that they have not seen any deterioration in Prime membership growth or retention following the 17% increase in Prime fees put through earlier in the year. This is not surprising to us, as in our view, the price increase was more than justified given the tremendous amount of customer value that has been added since the last price increase was implemented back in 2018, which includes the doubling of its fulfilment network and workforce, significant expansion of free same-day delivery and considerable investments in video and music content. Ultimately, we remain positive about Amazon’s future and believe that the company’s scale and market leadership will continue to drive growth for many years to come.”
