The coronavirus pandemic has changed the world. But it has also accelerated certain technological trends that investors should be tapped into. One that is just getting started is e-commerce and the online shopping pioneer still has an enormous growth runway.
ProShares' Executive Director of Thematic Investing Scott Helfstein sat down with The Motley Fool to dive into some of the intriguing stocks in their new ETF: ProShares MSCI Transformational Changes ETF (ANEW 0.54%). He had particularly intriguing thoughts on Amazon.com (AMZN 0.89%) and its future.
Corinne Cardina: Definitely. So that we can get to all four, I'm just going to kind of speed through these digital consumer. Let's start with Amazon. Amazon stock is up 1,700% in ten years. Beyond e-commerce, it's got a lot going for it, its biggest growth driver being Amazon Web Services, the cloud, of course. Do you think that Amazon can do anything near a repeat performance when we're looking ahead to the next decade? How do you envision this as an investment today?
Helfstein: That's where I get back to that 16%, that is the total e-commerce penetration of retail in America. We're still early on as much as it doesn't feel that way for a lot of people. There is a lot more to come. We're going to be doing more and more online. Even their roll out of the Amazon stores or their use of the Whole Foods brand in the food space, I think is all reflective of innovation. Certainly AWS has been a phenomenal success story for the company. I don't know about repeating past performance, but we do think that we're early in the digital consumer revolution still. So there's a lot more to come. We saw Amazon Prime Day had the largest sales on record. Alibaba (BABA +0.82%) just put out numbers last week from its Singles Day, which also showed phenomenally strong growth year-over-year. So there's more to come. Not only that, we also focus a lot on margins. You look at a company like Walmart (WMT +0.99%) that has successfully grown its e-commerce business, yet it's done so at the expense of margins. Whereas Amazon margins have consistently increased overtime. We think that that's a trend that they can continue. Some of those investments if they made a few years ago, for example, like their own delivery trucks has turned out to be a phenomenal advantage.
