Bezos Selling Part of His Stake: Why Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) is Trending

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) is in the spotlight today after founder and CEO Jeff Bezos said he is divesting around $1 billion worth of Amazon shares a year to finance his privately held space venture, Blue Origin rocket company. Bezos aim is to help finance Blue Origin until the venture is profitable. Bezos said, “My business model right now … for Blue Origin is I sell about $1 billion of Amazon stock a year and I use it to invest in Blue Origin”. Given Bezos holding of around 80.9 million Amazon shares, and Amazon’s closing price of around $909.28 yesterday, the billionaire would need to sell around 1.1 million shares per year to achieve his goal. Bulls hope that Bezos’ selling won’t change sentiment in Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), whose stock has been red-hot, rallying 21% year-to-date and 51% over the last four quarters.

As it stands, many bulls note that other tech billionaires such as Mark Zuckerberg for charity purposes have also been slowly divesting their shares, and many of those equities have still rallied, regardless.

What Does The Smart Money Sentiment Say?

At Insider Monkey, we’ve developed an investment strategy that has delivered market-beating returns over the past 12 months. Our strategy identifies the 100 best-performing funds of the previous quarter from among the collection of 700+ successful funds that we track in our database, which we accomplish using our returns methodology. We then study the portfolios of those 100 funds using the latest 13F data to uncover the 30 most popular mid-cap stocks (market caps of between $1 billion and $10 billion) among them to hold until the next filing period. This strategy delivered 39.7% gains over the past 12 months and outperformed the 24.1% gain enjoyed by the S&P 500 ETFs. Our enhanced small-cap hedge fund strategy returned more than 45% over the last 12 months and outperformed SPY by more than 30 percentage points over the last 4.5 years (see details here).

According to our data, 123 elite funds had a bullish position in Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) at the end of the fourth quarter, down 27 funds from the previous quarter.

The Bottom Line

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) is trending after its founder, Jeff Bezos, said that he would be divesting around $1 billion worth of stock a year to finance his space venture. For more reading, check out ‘10 Things You Can Do With Amazon Echo‘.

Disclosure:None

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), Boxes, Parcel, Retail, Order, delivery, post, shipping, stack

Frank Gaertner / Shutterstock.com