October wasn’t pretty for Amazon.
The company’s stock tumbled 20.2% in October, its worst month since sliding 25.4% in November 2008, during the heart of the financial crisis. Amazon climbed 4.4% on Oct. 31, ending the month at $1,598.01 a share.
It was Amazon’s thirteenth-worst month on record. The company’s all-time worst monthly performance came in February 2001, when the collapse of the dot-com bubble erased 41.1% of its share price.
| Month | Amazon stock performance |
|---|---|
| February 2001 | -41.1% |
| December 2000 | -37.0% |
| September 2001 | -33.2% |
| November 2000 | -32.6% |
| May 1999 | -31.0% |
| July 2006 | -30.5% |
| July 2004 | -28.5% |
| August 2001 | -28.4% |
| November 2008 | -25.4% |
| June 2000 | -24.8% |
| August 1998 | -24.5% |
| October 2008 | -21.3% |
| October 2018 | -20.2% |
This month’s plunge was triggered in part by third-quarter earnings released Oct. 25 that showed Amazon’s most important businesses were slowing down. Growth in Amazon.com, commissions and services for third-party sellers, subscription products like Amazon Prime, and cloud-computing business Amazon Web Services all slowed in the most recent quarter.
Amazon is also facing increased pressure from retailers looking to compete on selection and convenience. Walmart-owned Sam’s Club is opening an Amazon Go-like location in Dallas, Texas, that lets customers skip the line by shopping and paying through an app. Target is doubling down on private-label brands—a merchandise category that Amazon has been investing heavily in lately.
October’s selloff hit Jeff Bezos particularly hard. Amazon’s CEO lost $19.2 billion over two consecutive trading days, a record-setting decline, according to Bloomberg. Amazon’s October losses sliced roughly $30 billion off Bezos’s personal fortune in total, which started the month at a formidable $165 billion. Bezos remains the richest person in the world, with a comfortable lead on no. 2 Bill Gates’s $93.4 billion net worth.
