Don't forget to get to know all the Imposters cast members during the premiere February 7 at 10/9c. Related Content 7 Things We Learned from the First 12 Minutes of Imposters
Back when the company had its IPO in 1997, Amazon was pretty much just an online bookstore. The company sold its shares for just $18 to raise $54 million at a valuation of $438 million. Today, it takes Amazon about two days to raise that much cash (based on its 2016 free cash flow). If you had been able to buy $2,000 of Amazon's IPO and held on to it for the past 20 years, you'd be sitting on about $1,136,000 in Amazon stock today. That's a return of 56,821%, or an average of around 37% annually.
E-commerce giant Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) is one of America's most prominent growth companies. In the last decade, revenue has surged 12-fold -- and Amazon.com stock has nearly kept pace. \ AMZN Revenue (TTM), data by YCharts Still, this isn't a stock for the faint of heart.Amazon is valued at more than $150 billion despite running at approximately breakeven. Anything less than stellar performance could lead to a sharp drop in Amazon.com's stock price. Here are 3 reasons why Amazon shareholders should be wary.Too much on its plate An underappreciated risk facing Amazon.com is its loss of strategic focus.argins may not improve much. Amazon's loss of focus has led directly to a second problem: low margins. A decade ago, when Amazon was clearly focused on dominating one niche, it earned a respectable 6.5% operating margin. Amazon's operating margin has since plummeted to less than 1% -- and it's still falling.