Amazon and Wal-Mart Shares Both Up 14% in 2016

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 12, 4:55PM EST · Published Dec 10, 9:10AM EST

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Amazon and Wal-Mart Shares Both Up 14% in 2016 — © courtesy of Wal-Mart Stores Inc., photo By Spencer Tirey

They have been chasing one another toward the goal of being the top retailer in America, by one measure or another, for years. Based on stock price, the race is a tie this year. The share prices of Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE: WMT) are each up 14% in 2016.

Wal-Mart has allayed some of the fears that e-commerce will smother its growth. Same-store sales improvement runs a tepid percentage point or two higher. However, that is better than the erosion at several other retailers of size.

Wal-Mart also has increased its commitment to e-commerce via a buyout of online shopping company Jet.com for $3.3 billion. At the time, Bloomberg reported on the Jet.com acquisition:

“Wal-Mart has definitely put its stake in the ground saying, ‘We’re going to be winning in e-commerce,’” said Joseph Feldman, an analyst at Telsey Advisory Group. “Amazon should be concerned about what Wal-Mart is doing.”

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And Amazon is the largest e-commerce destination. However, Wal-Mart is massive. 24/7 Wall St. reported:

Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), the online retail company, sits next at 184 million unique visitors. Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE: WMT) is well down the list in 22nd place, with 93 million unique visitors. It, and the revenue it gets online, show something of the wall that Wal-Mart has to climb.

Occasionally, Wall Street becomes dismayed with Amazon because it overspends to get market share. Anxiety about its customer acquisition costs has been a long-time theme and has hurt shares from time to time.

As an aside, Amazon’s market cap is $365 billion and Wal-Mart’s is $216 billion. Wal-Mart’s shares will need to outperform Amazon’s by a wide margin next year to show that investor confidence this year was warranted.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.