Play Video Trading Nation: Amazon to $1 trillion?
Amazon just got a little closer to $1 trillion on Wednesday.
The e-commerce company rallied after Morgan Stanley became the biggest bull on the Street with its $2,500 price target.
Wednesday's surge added around $32 billion to Amazon's market cap, putting it less than $30 billion from the $1 trillion level Apple crossed for the first time 27 days earlier.
While Wall Street looks toward that milestone, one technical analyst is betting on a sharp pullback that would put its stock on the brink of a bear market.
"It's best to let the stock pull back, so I think $1,650 is the level I want to buy it before $2,500. I think it goes down first," said Mark Newton, technical analyst at Newton Advisors, on CNBC's "Trading Nation" on Wednesday.
A decline to $1,650 represents a 17 percent drop from current levels, pushing it into a correction but shy the 20 percent decrease that marks a bear market.
Newton says Amazon's moves in recent sessions have raised some technical flags that point to a possible pullback.
"RSI now, on a monthly basis, is at 89.5, the highest level overbought that it's been since 1999. At that time obviously Amazon had a very difficult time as did most stocks into 2002, 2003," said Newton.
Its monthly relative strength index, which measures momentum changes, was last as high as 90 in April 1999. From that peak to its bottom in September 2001, Amazon shares plummeted 95 percent.
"Even on a weekly basis when you see that RSI gauge over 75 (for example, it's happened about six times just since 2015 alone), five of those six times you were actually down over 10 percent, as much as 20 percent, really in the two to three months that followed," said Newton.
Boris Schlossberg, managing director of FX strategy at BK Asset Management, also sees its big swing higher as a warning sign.
"Amazon, of course, is the ultimate momentum stock at this point," said Schlossberg on "Trading Nation" on Wednesday. "I would not want to chase it at this point. I think it's too dangerous."
Schlossberg has a strategy for playing Amazon's surge in anticipation of any market pullback.
"If I was going to sell it, I would sell it against the other $1 trillion company, Apple. I would do a pairs trade — short Amazon, long Apple," Schlossberg explained. "If we do get any kind of pullback in the market, I think the market is going to run to safety of cash-rich companies and Apple is going to outperform Amazon."
Amazon has seen gains more than double Apple in 2018 so far. In the year to date, Amazon has climbed 71 percent, while Apple has increased 32 percent.
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