Amazon stock price tops $2,000 mark

Online retail giant could join Apple in $1 trillion market value club

The share price of Amazon, the online retail giant and one of Wall Street’s most popular and best-performing stocks, topped $2,000 for the first time Thursday, putting it within striking distance of joining Apple as the only U.S. companies with a market value of $1 trillion.

The surge comes as dominant megasized technology stocks continue to lead the U.S. equity market higher and drive indexes with big tech weightings, such as the Nasdaq composite and Standard & Poor’s 500, to record highs.

At its peak price of $2,025.57 Thursday, Amazon’s market value swelled to an estimated $988 billion. This month, Apple became the first U.S. publicly traded company in history to crack the

$1 trillion market value barrier.

The Amazon juggernaut, led by CEO Jeff Bezos, not only is the undisputed king of the online retail industry, with roughly 50 percent of the total market, according to eMarketer, it also is a lead player in the fast-growing public cloud computing business, via its Amazon Web Services unit.

Amazon is also pushing into new businesses, such as groceries, a move highlighted by its purchase last year of upscale grocer Whole Foods Market for

$13.7 billion. It also entered the health care space in June with the purchase of online pharmacy PillPack.

Morgan Stanley analyst Brian Nowak cited Amazon’s “improving business mix” as a key reason why he sees Amazon “growing rapidly” and why he upped his price target for the stock to $2,500 a share this week. Peter Cohan, a lecturer of strategy at Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, says the stock can hit $4,000 by next summer.

Amazon shares closed at $2,002.22 on Thursday, extending its year-to-date gain to 71 percent.

In the quarter that ended in June, Amazon reported sales of $52.9 billion and a profit of $2.5 billion. The company told Wall Street it expected third-quarter net sales of $54 billion to $57.5 billion, which equates to year-over-year growth of 23 to 31 percent.

Amazon’s close above $2,000 Thursday makes it the only stock in the S&P 500 to have a share price that high, according to S&P Dow Jones Indices.