Beat Amazon

Any thought how Amazon can be beaten down? I kind of beat down Amazon yesterday betting for its earnings and walked away with double incomes. Not because I knew it would disappoint. No one could know for sure and it was too risky to bet for one way. I bet a smarter way: per its pre-earnings options that suggested it could jump up or down by about 40 points, I bet it would not move up or down by 80 points or so. In other words, it would be moving around in a defined range bound regardless if its earnings beat or missed. I was happy with my overnight bets that let me walk away with full profits for both ends of betting. But this is not what I'm talking about today. What I'm asking is really how to beat Amazon business-wise.

“You must be an idiot!” I’m sure this is what I will likely hear about with this kind of thinking. Indeed, there seems nothing Amazon cannot beat whenever it wants to step in. Virtually all the stocks are doing poorly in comparison to Amazon if their business is somehow touched by this e-commerce giant. I got that and definitely I also shared the same thought until recently. When I heard about it, I thought it was a joke but when I checked about its stock prices vs Amazon in the past 3+ years, I was appalled and couldn’t believe my eyes! If I showed you the chart below for two retailer stocks, which one you would think was Amazon’s curve? I bet 100% would say the upper one was Amazon if I didn’t give you the prewarning above, right?

Of course, we are all wrong and the other stock has comfortably beaten Amazon by a wide margin in the past 3+ years, since its birth on the stock market! What is more astonishing is that this is a pure Brick & Mortar retail business without any e-commerce yet. I wish I were smart enough to know and invest in this company as soon as its IPO but due to my ignorance, I only heard about it recently and even have never seen it physically anywhere! I’m talking about Ollie's (OLLI), a discounted B&M retailer with a lot of similar products that can effectively compete with Amazon price-wise. Ollie’s calls itself “one of America’s largest retailers of closeout merchandise and excess inventory”.  Actually Ollie’s has started its business since 1982 but was only going IPO about 4 years ago. Location-wise, it is still very limited geographically and that’s why I have never seen it nearby. Not sure if anyone has first-hand shopping experience with Ollie’s. It’s said shopping at Ollie’s is just like a treasure-hunting experience, as customers rarely know what deals or products they’ll find while browsing the store’s aisles.  Here is the picture of the store. Of course with only a 4 years’ publically listed life span to date, it is hard to say definitely that it can beat Amazon but its momentum seems quite strong and promising. Ollies is definitely a great stock I will be closely watching with full interest. After all, hardly can you see anything that can beat Amazon for several years already, especially a B&M retailer against the e-commerce giant!!  I wish Ollies can emerge as a new retailing business model that even Amazon cannot disrupt!!