Amazon.com
Current return on $10,000: $1.3 million
In 1994, Jeff Bezos left a high-paying job at a hedge fund and took his car from New York to Seattle. Along the way, he created the business plan for an innovative ecommerce site for books, Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN). In 1996, the year before the company went public, Amazon.com only generated sales of $15.7 million and absorbed a net loss of $5.8 million.
However, in May 1997, Bezos raised $54 million by taking the company public, and the stock spiked 30% on its first day of trading.
The company faced plenty of competition, including Barnes & Noble‘s (NYSE:BKS) online bookstore. But Amazon eventually evolved beyond its bookstore roots and became a gorilla of e-commerce and one of brick-and-mortar retailers’ greatest threats. The company also launched the Kindle e-reader in 2007, and by 2010, AMZN was a 100-fold returner.
The Kindle since has evolved into the Kindle Fire tablet and helped spark Amazon to further gains.
A long-time follower of the IPO scene, back in 1999 Tom started one of the first sites in the space called WebIPO. It was a place where investors got research as well as access to deals for the dot-com boom. Tom also wrote the top-selling book, Investing in IPOs. In it, he covers all the aspects of analyzing an IPO, such as reading the prospectus, detecting the risk factors and understanding some of the arcane regulations. But don’t worry — if that process is too intimidating for you, thankfully Tom will do the legwork for you right here in the IPO Playbook blog.
Comments are currently unavailable. Please check back soon.