The time between Thanksgiving and Christmas is traditionally defined as the holiday season for a wide range of actions. Often times people have a choice between meeting at Thanksgiving or Christmas and Thanksgiving works out a little better because of weather conditions, there are fewer of them. The day after Thanksgiving is Black Friday because after meeting the family, they needed something to do and going shopping was on the list. All the above is based on expectations and companies in the retail business will live and die on those expectations.

In an article from Reuters, Amazon believes a jump in 4th quarter revenue and profit boosted by a holiday marketing blitz, faster delivery, and improving outlook for its cloud division. Amazon’s total revenue was $143.1 billion.

Amazon is the world’s largest cloud provider and online retailer. In cloud services it recently invested in Anthropic which makes chatbots. On the retail side, Amazon has reorganized its delivery network to locate goods closer to shoppers, letting it fulfill orders faster than before at less cost. One method Amazon is using is more robots in the warehouse.

Andy Jassy, Amazon’s CEO said its cloud service or AWS continued to stabilize.

AWS brought in revenue of $23.1 billion.

Marketing events help prop up sales. Amazon had a Prime Day during the summer and it brought in its biggest sales ever. Another Prime Day (for those who pay $139 a year for free shipping and other events to be a Prime member) was scheduled for October.

Amazon is expecting holiday revenue to be above $160 billion.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, in the current environment with a possible downturn in the economy, analysts and investors are paying particular attention to expectations and did the company meet or exceed them? if no, the stock falls, if yes, the stock could rally. For a dividend paying investor whether the company beat expectations for growth is secondary to whether it remained profitable. Growth is nice, but being profitable and maintaining margins is much more important. If the company’s profits fall, then it is time to find alternatives, but chances are high the company would have told investors to lower their expectations before releasing the numbers to the public.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.