Is Amazon’s Luck Running Out?

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jan 18, 10:28AM EST

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Surveys of online e-commerce have started to come in. Sales appear to have been up about 25% for the holiday season, but their were areas of weakness including PCs, books, and music. Luxury goods appear to have done well.

All of this news is troubling the people at Prudential. They sent out a cautionary not on Amazon (AMZN), indicating that data on slow book sales at other online retailers might lead to a downer for the largest online superstore.

Amazon has been something of an internet Lazarus. The shares collapsed below $26 in July. They now change hands at over $37, a nice run of over 40% in a short time.

Amazon’s problem is simple. If it misses estimates in its strongest quarter which includes the holidays, the faithful may flee the stock for a year or more.

Unless of course, Mr. Bezos come up with another idea like selling movie downloads.

Douglas A. McIntyre can be reached at [email protected]. He does not own securities in companies that he writes about.

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.