One of the most important disciplines in investing is constantly updating the best argument against your own position.
Not dismissing it. Not looking for reasons it’s wrong. Actually understanding it well enough to decide how much conviction your own thesis deserves.
$AMZN has badly lagged the market and many other AI names recently, and I think the counter thesis has evolved.
The biggest new threat is agentic commerce. Meta’s Muse and other AI agents could increasingly control product discovery and purchasing, potentially weakening Amazon’s retail and advertising moat.
That’s real. But I think it plays out slowly, Amazon will adapt through its own agents, including Project Moonraker, or partnerships that are seeking access into and monetization from the world’s largest ecommerce platform, and in an agent-first world the upside to AWS, Trainium, Graviton and Amazon’s broader AI infrastructure business could ultimately more than offset the advertising dollars at risk.
Then there’s Anthropic. A recent barrage of negative headlines around slowing growth and Meta/Microsoft reducing Claude usage has spilled over into
$AMZN sentiment.
Again, worth taking seriously. But much of that narrative looks incomplete. Anthropic’s revenue growth remains extraordinary, its IPO appears very much alive, and its massive long term commitment to AWS remains intact. We are still early and one can make a strong argument that AWS has more to gain from an open source first AI world than it would lose from Anthropic’s and OAI’s relative weakness, if it even plays out that way.
And now sharply higher diesel prices create another near term headwind to Amazon’s shipping margins. That’s real too. But either fuel prices normalize or as with past cost inflation Amazon eventually passes much of the higher cost through while continuing to drive down fulfillment costs.
I don’t need the counter thesis to be wrong to own
$AMZN.
I just need the bull thesis to be more right.