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.

There was a very nice kick-save by equity bulls on Thursday, as the bears looked emboldened early but failed despite Meta's meltdown and a tick up in rates. And then there was good EPS news after the close, with GOOGL soaring and MSFT popping.

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.

We hate to use overly complicated technical terms to describe the recent price action, but the stock market is acting a little -- squirrely. Or nervous. Or fidgety. Who is going to put up the big money to take prices higher? Are investors still in profit-taking mode for the massive gainers but then rotating to other areas of the market? In the big picture, there hasn't been a negative technical mark on the current uptrend. But there certainly does seem to be some short-term indecision among market participants.