Amazon Shares Rise 2.8 Percent to $261, a Week Before Earnings and Days After the Alexa Tablet Launch

Amazon shares rose 2.8 percent on Friday, a rebound from Thursday's drop, with the next earnings report set for Oct. 29 and no new company figure filed with the move.

The stock traded at $261.09, up $7.03, or 2.77 percent, from Thursday's close of $254.06. It opened at $256.50 and traded between $256.00 and $261.64. Volume was above 21 million shares by early afternoon. The 52-week range is $196 to $287.20. The market value is about $2.82 trillion. Trailing revenue is about $776 billion. Net income is about $135 billion. The shares pay no dividend. Sixty analysts rate the stock a strong buy, with an average target of $331.53, about 27 percent above Friday's print. Consensus earnings for the coming quarter are $1.96 a share.

Thursday's close was down 2.25 percent, on a session that also carried reports of targeted layoffs, a higher price for reserved graphics-chip capacity on Amazon Web Services, and a shopping dispute over a Meta tool. Friday did not bring a filing that reversed any of those. It brought a bid in a stock that had sold off, two weeks before a report that will be read for AWS growth and for how much the company is still spending on data centers.

The product news of the week was the Alexa Tablet line, announced Thursday and on sale Oct. 14. Amazon dropped the Fire name. The tablets run full Android with the Google Play store. The 8-inch model starts at $229.99, the 11-inch at $329.99 and the 12 Pro at $499. Panos Panay, who runs hardware and Alexa, told The Verge that "Google Play was a necessity, end of story," and that he had told the team to "start from zero, don't use any components we've ever used." A tablet launch is not an earnings line. It is the consumer bet sitting next to the cloud bet the Oct. 29 call will be about.

At $261 the shares are about 9 percent under the 52-week high and a third above the low. A 2.8 percent day on no new number is a tape trade into a report, not a change in the business. The report is the next figure that is not a price.