Is Amazon a Good Stock to Buy For 2022?

Amazon (AMZN -1.11%) has been one of the best performing stocks in the market over the past couple decades, but what about the company's future potential? In this Fool Live video clip, recorded on Dec. 13, Fool.com contributors Matt Frankel, Danny Vena, and Jason Hall discuss whether Amazon is still a good stock to buy for 2022 and beyond.

Matt Frankel: This is Amazon, ticker symbol AMZN. Danny is going to talk about Amazon and why I am the most bullish on Amazon out of the three of us.

Danny Vena: That's interesting because this is another case of what can you say about Amazon that people don't already know? On the plus side of the coin, Amazon is not going to have any problems over the holidays. They sell a lot of stuff for a lot of people. Some of it is stuff that Amazon has purchased and is reselling. Some of it they get a cut from the merchants that sell on their platform.

For me, I rated Amazon a little lower compared to some of these other companies simply because I think what we saw before the pandemic was the reality of Amazon. Its growth was slowing to about 20% year-over-year. Of course, it jettisoned that problem and shot up during the pandemic because everybody pivoted e-commerce but once you get to be the size of an Amazon, I think it's going to be difficult for Amazon to continue to grow at the rate that we saw during the pandemic, I think it's going to slow back down.

I think Amazon will continue to be a market beater and I think that there's still plenty of growth opportunity for Amazon, whether it be cloud computing, whether it be digital advertising, whether it be expanding into new international e-commerce markets, but I do think that inevitably its growth has to slow and I think that's going to kick a lot of the lookie-loos out of the stock. People who are marginally interested in Amazon when the growth slows, you're going to see a lot of people abandon Amazon like rats off a sinking ship. It's a company that's going to stay in my portfolio, but I think its growth is only going to slow.

Jason Hall: Yeah, this is one that I really struggle with. I do think a lot of the fastest-growing parts of its business are the ones that are the most profitable, right? Like AWS, for instance. We've talked about the first best customer approach that it takes. You think about Fulfilled by Amazon, the fact that so many of its sellers use it as the logistics and distributions company. That's a pretty good margin business to be in.

The potential for it to become a third-party shipper, right? It's essentially the biggest shipper in the United States now or it will be within a few months. The ability to start taking on packages just to give additional incremental margins for packages, for places that it's already going is really, really compelling, but I just continue to struggle with so many aspects of thinking about how it's valued. As it gets larger, the antitrust risks get a little bit higher. I don't necessarily know that for a lot of businesses, those are harmful than total returns if the business gets broken up.

I think because Amazon gets so much benefit from its scale and its vertical integration, I think there is risk that those broken apart entities aren't worth as much broken apart, so that's why I rated it lower.

Frankel: I don't have too much to add. I think that Amazon does have some growth verticals that are unappreciated by the market. Healthcare in particular is one. I think Amazon has a huge opportunity -- Amazon Care they call it, so that's one. Out of this list of ten [holiday shopping] stocks, if you were going to ask me which one I thought was going to have the best holiday quarter, it would probably be Amazon.