By:
On:
In: Around the web
Tagged:
With: 0 Comments

Institutional investors currently hold around $260 billion or 64.2% in Amazon [stckqut]AMZN[/stckqut] stock.

Look at its top three institutional owners. Vanguard Group Inc owns $21.44 billion in Amazon.com, Inc., which represents roughly 5.26% of the company’s market cap and approximately 8.25% of the institutional ownership. Similar statistics are true for the second largest owner, Price T Rowe Associates Inc, which owns 20,919,431 shares of the stock are valued at $17.84 billion. The third largest holder is Fmr Llc, which currently holds $16.49 billion worth of this stock and that ownership represents nearly 4.05% of its market capitalization.

At the end of 12/31/2016 reporting period, 984 institutional holders increased their position in Amazon.com by some 14,465,876 shares, 724 decreased positions by 23,425,019 and 164 held positions by 266,929,329. That puts total institutional holdings at 304,820,224 shares, according to SEC filings. The stock grabbed 219 new institutional investments totaling 3,835,622 shares while 136 institutional investors sold out their entire positions totaling 3,989,532 shares.

Multiple company employees have indulged in significant insider trading. Amazon.com, Inc. disclosed in a document filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that Director RYDER THOMAS O has sold 4,000 shares of Amazon.com, Inc. in trading session dated Mar. 01, 2017. These shares are worth $3,408,880 and were traded at $852.22 each. The SEC filing shows that ALBERG TOM A performed a sale of 590 shares. The Director disposed these shares by way of transaction on Feb. 21, 2017. The company’s shares were given away at $850 per share worth to an income of some $501,500 on account of ALBERG TOM A.Senior Vice President, Zapolsky David, sold 503 common shares of Amazon.com, Inc. in the open market. In a transaction dated Feb. 21, 2017, the shares were put up for sale at an average price of $850, raking in a sum of $427,550. After this sale, 2,523 common shares of AMZN are directly owned by the insider, with total stake valued at $2,153,179.In the transaction dated Feb. 15, 2017, the great number of shares disposed came courtesy the CEO Worldwide Consumer; WILKE JEFFREY A disposed a total of 4,890 shares at an average price of $840.06, amounting to approximately $4,107,893. The insider now directly owns 70,653 shares worth $60,296,683.

Source: Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN): A Detailed Look at its Institutional Ownership | Post Analyst

By:
On:
In: Commentary
Tagged: , , , , , , , ,
With: 0 Comments

NVIDIA Corporation [stckqut]NVDA[/stckqut] is driven by “specialized computing,” that is, the transforming of specific software tasks into physical silicon chips instead of depending on an ever-faster do-it-all CPU, or central processing unit. It has existed in some form or another for decades, but it has lately become the driving force behind pretty much everything cool in technology, from artificial intelligence to self-driving cars. Why? Because those CPUs aren’t getting faster at the pace they once were. Moore’s Law is dying.

Moore’s Law is the notion that, every two years or so, the number of transistors in a chip doubles. Its popular conception is that computers keep getting faster, smaller and more power-efficient. That isn’t happening the way it used to. “It’s not like Moore’s Law is going to hit a brick wall — it’s going to kind of sputter to an end,” says Daniel Reed, chair of computational science and bioinformatics at the University of Iowa.

As Intel and the other chip foundries spend fortunes to keep the wheel turning, chip designers across the industry are finding creative ways to continue at the old pace of Moore’s Law, and in many cases increase device performance even more quickly.

“Most of the advances today come from [chip] design and software,” says Nvidia chief scientist William Dally. “For us it’s been a challenge because we feel under a lot of pressure to constantly deliver twice the performance per generation,” he adds. So far, Nvidia has accomplished that cadence even when the size of the elements on the chip doesn’t change, and the only thing that does is its design, or “architecture.”

Here’s a less-than-exhaustive list of all the applications to which the principle of specialized computing has been applied: Artificial intelligence, image recognition, self-driving cars, virtual reality, bitcoin mining, drones, data centers, even photography. Pretty much every technology company that makes hardware or supplies it — including Apple, Samsung, Amazon, Qualcomm, Nvidia, Broadcom, Intel, Huawei and Xiaomi — is exploiting this phenomenon. Even companies that only produce chips for their own use, including Microsoft, Google, and Facebook, are doing it.

Many years ago, almost all computing was done with the CPU, one thing after another in sequence, says Keith Kressin, a senior vice president at Qualcomm. Gradually, often-used but processor-intensive tasks were diverted to specialized chips. Those tasks were processed in parallel, while the CPU did only what was absolutely required.

These task-focused chips come in a wide variety, reflecting the breadth of their uses, and the lines between them can be blurry. One kind, the graphics processing unit — think Nvidia and gamers — found wider use for tasks to which it’s uniquely suited, including artificial intelligence. Later on, the rise of smartphones created a gigantic need for another type, digital signal processing chips, designed to enhance photography, for example.

Source: How Chip Designers Are Breaking Moore’s Law – WSJ

By:
On:
In: Around the web
Tagged:
With: 0 Comments

Shares of eCommerce giant Amazon.com, Inc [stckqut]AMZN[/stckqut] have gained more than 50% in the last one year, driven by the twin growth engines of eCommerce and cloud computing. These engines of growth are likely to continue their performance going forward making AMZN stock a good buy. Both the eCommere market and the cloud computing market will continue to grow. And now, Amazon.com Inc has another potential growth driver in its Echo devices and Alexa digital assistant.

Rising popularity of Amazon Echo.

In the last year, there has been a lot of buzz around Amazon’s Echo devices and its digital assistant Alexa. Alexa was everywhere during the CES 2017. According to a CIRP report, Echo’s brand awareness increased to 82% in the United States last year compared to 47% awareness level at the end of 2015. The rise in the product awareness was driven by strong promotion by the eCommerce giant on both conventional media and its eCommerce platform.

Echo was one of the most sold devices on Amazon.com during the holiday season last year. In a press release, Amazon had said that “Echo and Echo Dot were the best-selling products across Amazon this year, and we’re thrilled that millions of new customers will be introduced to Alexa as a result. Despite our best efforts and ramped-up production, we still had trouble keeping them in stock. From turning on Christmas lights and playing holiday music to shopping for gifts and asking for help with cookie recipes, Alexa continues to get smarter every day”.

Source: Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN) Stock: A $10 Billion Revenue Opportunity For Amazon.com Inc

Photo by Ted Drake

By:
On:
In: Around the web
Tagged:
With: 0 Comments

Amazon Inc. [stckqut]AMZN[/stckqut] announced recently that its Prime Now one and two-hour delivery service adds wine and beer to its product offerings available for superfast delivery in Cincinnati and Columbus. The company adds hundreds of alcohol-related products to its inventory from popular name brands such as Chateau Ste. Michelle, Bud Light and Veuve Clicquot as well as local favorites like Great Lakes Brewing Company, Rhinegeist and MadTree Brewing.

“We are excited to continue expanding our product offerings and we know customers will love getting wine and beer delivered right to their door in one hour or less,” said Stephenie Landry, vice president of Prime Now worldwide. “Whether you run out of wine at your dinner party or need more chilled champagne for mimosas at a family brunch, Prime Now can save customers time with superfast delivery so they can skip a trip to the store.”

Customers in Prime Now eligible neighborhoods can use the one and two-hour delivery service to order wine and beer along with tens of thousands of other daily essentials. Customers can enter their ZIP code in the Prime Now app or on primenow.com to see if the service is available or can request to be notified when the service becomes available in their area.

Through Prime Now, Prime members can get free two-hour delivery and one-hour delivery is $7.99. Prime members can download the Prime Now app, available on iOS and Android devices, or visit www.primenow.com to place orders and track the status of their delivery in real time. Learn more about Amazon Prime Now at www.primenow.com.

Source: Amazon – Press Room – Press Release

By:
On:
In: Around the web
Tagged: , ,
With: 0 Comments

Online retailer Amazon is set to create more than 5,000 jobs in Britain this year, the company said on Monday, boosting its investment in the country once more even as it prepares to leave the European Union.

Amazon, along with other tech giants such as Google and Apple, has increased its commitment to Britain in the last year, saying Britain’s referendum decision to leave the EU last June did not affect its investment plans.

The plans to add over 5,000 jobs in 2017 is a record for Amazon in Britain, although at least 2,000 of the jobs had been previously announced. The moves would take its permanent workforce in the country to 24,000.

Source: Amazon to create over 5,000 jobs in Britain in 2017 | Reuters