Amazon.com is the leading U.S. e-commerce retailer and among the top e-commerce sites globally. Amazon.com also includes Amazon Web Services (AWS), the global leader in cloud-based Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platforms. The company's Prime membership platform is a key online retail differentiator, providing customers with free shipping (after an annual fee) along with exclusive media content (music, video, audible books, etc.). The company's Kindle reader and Alexa-based Echo and Dot digital voice assistants are category leaders.

Stocks are solidly higher Friday morning, led by good earnings from various companies (with Amazon and Intel leading the charge) as well as a jobs report that is being broadly interpreted as meaning that Fed will indeed cut interest rates further next week. Traders may finally be starting to look ahead, positioning themselves for a world in which the name of the next U.S. president will be known, the economy will remain on solid footing, interest rates will continue to head lower, and inflation will finally hit the magic 2% level.

Amazon is the leading online retailer and marketplace for third party sellers. Retail related revenue represents approximately 75% of total, followed by Amazon Web Services' cloud computing, storage, database, and other offerings (15%), advertising services (5% to 10%), and other the remainder. International segments constitute 25% to 30% of Amazon's non-AWS sales, led by Germany, the United Kingdom, and Japan.

The United States economy is full of innovation. It has to be. Manufacturing industries that dominated the economy decades ago - textiles, televisions, even automobiles to a large degree - have moved overseas, where labor and materials costs are lower. Yet the U.S. economy, even during the pandemic and the current period of high inflation, has expanded to record levels. If U.S. corporations weren't innovating, creating new products (such as vaccines and AI) and services (such as Zoom calls) and moving into new markets, the domestic economy would not be growing, and capital would not be flooding into the country. The current high level of the U.S. dollar relative to currencies around the world attests to the confidence that global investors have in the durable and innovative U.S. economy.