Why Amazon’s Latest Upgrade Might Be Its Most Important Yet

Key Points

• Shares of Amazon have repeatedly failed to break through $240 this year, forming a dangerous-looking triple top.
• However, last week’s upgrade from Wells Fargo stands out in a sea of reiterated Buy ratings. 
• With several key tailwinds in place, this feels like a critical moment for Amazon’s stock. 

Amazon.com Inc NASDAQ: AMZN has been one of the market’s hottest tech stocks in recent years, and remains one of its most closely followed. It conquered e-commerce, turned cloud computing into a household term, and built an advertising business on track to bring in more than $60 billion this year. But while its fundamentals are undoubtedly impressive, its stock has frustrated investors in recent months. 

Despite the broader equity market pushing on to fresh records almost weekly since July, Amazon has yet to close above last February’s all-time high. Shares have repeatedly run into resistance around the $240 mark, failing to push through on multiple occasions over the past nine months, including twice in the past two months alone. 

This pattern has formed what’s known in technical analysis as a “triple top,” a bearish setup that often warns of tiring bullish momentum. The failure to clear such a level, particularly in an environment of strong risk-on sentiment and supportive macro conditions, raises uncomfortable questions about whether Amazon’s rally is stalling.

Against that backdrop, last week’s upgrade from Wells Fargo may carry far more weight than the market initially appreciated. Let’s jump in and see why. 

Technical Resistance Turns Into a Warning Sign

A triple top occurs when a stock fails to break through the same resistance level three times in succession. Each rejection signals that buyers lose conviction at that price point, and over time, the repeated failures can create a ceiling that grows harder to crack.

For Amazon, that ceiling is $240. As we’ve flagged multiple times in recent weeks, the stock has rallied hard up to that level, only to be beaten back into a retreat. The most recent attempts in July and early September came during periods of broad market strength, with indexes pushing higher on renewed optimism around cooling inflation, falling interest rates, and strengthening economic growth.

It is concerning that Amazon could not capitalize despite these tailwinds, and the bears are right to wonder if the stock’s weakness is a canary in the coal mine.

Wells Fargo Upgrade Carries Extra Weight

However, all this makes last week’s analyst update all the more significant. For months, the company has collected reiterated Buy ratings from Wall Street, a steady chorus that added little incremental conviction. Last Wednesday, however, Wells Fargo upped its rating from Equal Weight to Overweight, a material upgrade that stands out from Telsey Advisory Group’s reiterated Outperform rating on the same day.

While it can’t be said Wells Fargo was an out-and-out bear on Amazon shares, the upgrade does suggest they are throwing in the towel and committing to the bull case. The fact that this is happening in the face of the stock’s ongoing failure to break through $240 suggests the team there has a high degree of confidence in this happening soon. 

Their rationale was centered on Project Rainier, Amazon Web Services’ next-generation initiative expected to accelerate cloud revenue growth. With AI workloads surging, Wells Fargo believes AWS is positioned to reaccelerate after a period of slower growth. In addition, Amazon’s expanding advertising arm and relentless retail scale give it multiple levers to pull, strengthening the long-term outlook.

Can Amazon Finally Break Through?

For investors looking for other tailwinds to get excited about, beyond AWS, Amazon continues to deliver on multiple fronts. Its advertising unit is one of the fastest-growing businesses in the digital economy, while its e-commerce Prime business remains the linchpin of its retail empire. October’s upcoming Prime Day is expected to collect billions in consumer spending. 

These engines give Amazon a depth of growth drivers that most companies can only dream of. In recent weeks, the issue has been translating these solid, if not actually improving, fundamentals into price performance. 

The Wells Fargo upgrade underscores that, despite the stock’s frustrating chart, now is not the time to give up on Amazon. Instead, the opposite is the case. The underlying businesses remain strong, and the stock could soon have enough momentum to break through to fresh highs.