Wall Street bullish on Amazon as stock hits $2,000 a share

Aug. 30 (UPI) -- The price of Amazon stock crossed the $2,000-per-share threshold on Thursday for the first time before retreating.

The stock hit $2,009.67 during early morning New York Stock Exchange trading. The value of Amazon stock has increased 71 percent in 2018, and with a current market cap of $974 billion, needs only to gain $50 more per share to value its market cap at $1 trillion. Apple became the first and only American public company to achieve $1 trillion in value on Aug. 2.

Amazon's latest record high comes after the stock gained 3.2 percent in a day, prompted by a bullish prediction by Morgan Stanley analysts, who raised their 12-month price target for Amazon from $1,850 per share to $2,500 per share. The new target implies a 25.1 percent improvement from Wednesday's record high by August 2019.

"We have increasing confidence that Amazon's rapidly growing, increasingly large, high-margin revenue streams (advertising, AWS [Amazon Web Services], subscriptions) will drive higher profitability and continued upward estimate revisions," Morgan Stanley analyst Brian Nowak wrote Wednesday.