Amazon’s stock just racked up its highest close in more than two years

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Amazon.com Inc. shares continued their charge higher Friday, securing their highest close in more than two years.

The e-commerce giant’s stock advanced 2.7% in Friday’s session to finish the day at $ 174.45. That was the best ending level since Dec. 9, 2021, when Amazon’s stock AMZN, +2.71% closed at $ 147.17, according to Dow Jones Market Data.

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Amazon briefly surpassed Alphabet Inc. GOOG, +2.04% GOOGL, +2.12% as the third most valuable U.S. company by market capitalization last week, though it’s since fallen back to the No. 4 spot. Still, the recent momentum for Amazon shares has been enough to help the company hold down a place in the top four even as Nvidia Corp. NVDA, +3.58% nips at its heels.

Alphabet finished Friday’s session with a $ 1.86 trillion market cap, while Amazon’s was $ 1.81 trillion and Nvidia’s was $ 1.78 trillion.

Wall Street had a mixed reaction to earnings from big technology companies this quarter, but Amazon’s results were among those that were well received.

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“Overall the overhangs which kept a lid on AMZN?shares — e-commerce deceleration in 2021, e-commerce deceleration and margin compression in 2022 and AWS deceleration in 2023 — will have dissipated throughout 2024,” UBS analyst Stephen Ju wrote in a note to clients following those results.

The company has been a huge driver of earnings growth for the S&P 500 consumer discretionary sector, as its quarterly earnings per share grew to $ 1 in the latest quarter from 3 cents a year before. The consumer discretionary sector is now expected to post 33% growth in EPS for the fourth quarter, according to FactSet, but without Amazon, that would swing to a decline of about 1%.