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Amazon Hits $1 Trillion Market Value Milestone (reuters.com)
Amazon.com on Tuesday became the second U.S. company to reach $1 trillion in stock market value, just weeks after Apple hit the same milestone on Aug. 2. Shares in the world's largest online retailer last traded up 1.4 percent at $2,041.68. Its shares hit the $2050.2677 level to give its stock a value of $1 trillion. From a report: Amazon and Apple, which hit the trillion-dollar milestone on Aug. 2, symbolize the growing influence of tech companies on markets and the economy. The industry is amassing wealth and power, creating a new order in business where the most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data. Not far behind in market value are Google owner Alphabet Inc. and Microsoft Corp. , both approaching $900 billion, while Facebook -- which crossed $500 billion in July 2017, a day after Amazon -- has stalled at those levels amid a data-privacy scandal and growth concerns.
I find it amusing that with both companies being at a one trillion market cap, AAPL has a P/E ratio of 20, while AMZN has nearly an order of magnitude higher P/E at 185.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If capitalism is so great, why does it allow monopolies to exist?
Capitalism doesn't really "allow" or "not allow" things. That would be a regulatory scheme.
Capitalism (or more specifically, free markets) is a system that is efficient on the micro-level (for a certain definition of "efficient".) If the system evolves into a monopoly, however, the free market assumptions no longer hold, and the system is no longer efficient.
It seems to me that monopolies are the result of executing your capitalistic business plan successfully. In the physics world, monopolies would represent a low entropy state.
I don't even know what that means. In general, monopolies are a result of entry barriers and economy of scale (which may often be the same: the entry barrier is often because of the economies of scale.)
Once a large corporation enter the scene, there is also an anticompetitive entry barrier: a larger corporation can simply underprice an upstart competitor, using the strategy that they can simply take a loss until their competition goes bankrupt, and once the competitors are all driven out of business, raise their prices to recoup their losses. Is this "executing a capitalistic business plan successfully"? Well, I suppose.