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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.
Here's what one shareholder has to say about holding on through the ups and downs of this incredibly successful stock. This piece was updated on March 13, 2017, and originally published on June 26, 2016. Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) has an impressive stock price history -- perhaps one of the greatest over the past two decades. After accounting for three stock splits, Amazon's shares have advanced from $1.50 in May 1997 to over $850 today -- a 56,500% return! AMZN data by YCharts.