S&P 500 Earnings Surge as Amazon's Anthropic Bet Pays Off
Amazon's massive paper gains on its Anthropic investment are turbocharging S&P 500 profit growth to wild levels.
Big Tech is rewriting the earnings rulebook, and Amazon just grabbed the pen. The e-commerce and cloud giant reported abnormally large earnings growth, driven largely by paper gains tied to its investment in AI startup Anthropic. That's not organic business momentum — that's a balance-sheet windfall dressed up as a profit explosion.
Amazon joins a growing club of mega-cap names posting eye-popping earnings numbers that owe more to unrealized investment gains than to actual operational performance. When the biggest stocks in the index start booking paper profits as headline earnings, the S&P 500's aggregate growth rate gets turbocharged in ways that can mislead traders scanning for fundamental strength.
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Here's the tradeable angle: know what you're actually buying. When a company's earnings beat is fueled by mark-to-market moves on a private AI startup, that number can reverse just as fast as sentiment shifts. Anthropic isn't publicly traded, so those valuations are estimates — and estimates have a nasty habit of getting revised.
For active traders, this earnings season is a masterclass in reading the fine print. Strip out the investment gains, and the underlying profit picture for some of these giants may look far less explosive. That doesn't mean the trade is wrong — but it does mean your thesis needs to be airtight before you chase the move.
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