Just noticed something interesting about how Wall Street has been viewing Amazon stock price movements heading into recent years. Back when 2024 kicked off, the market was pretty cautious on most mega-cap tech stocks, but Amazon? That was a different story entirely.

In a single day, five major brokerages - Piper Sandler, Bank of America, D.A. Davidson, Wolfe, and Wells Fargo - all named Amazon their top pick. And they weren't alone. JPMorgan, Evercore ISI, Citi, TD Cowen, and Bernstein also had it as a top play. The consensus was overwhelming: 39 out of 43 analysts rated it as a "Strong Buy," with a mean target price around $177.97, which was roughly 20% above the price at that time.

What made analysts so convinced? The reasons were actually pretty solid. Bank of America's Justin Post was betting on advertising revenue growth adding significant margin expansion. Amazon was launching an ad-supported Prime tier that year, and with the U.S. elections plus the Paris Olympics driving digital ad spend, the timing looked favorable.

Then there's AWS. D.A. Davidson's analyst saw AWS making similar absolute dollar gains as Azure despite lower percentage growth. More interesting was the AI angle - Wells Fargo estimated enterprise AI could contribute 7% of AWS revenues in 2024, with bigger upside in following years. AWS margins had already expanded to 30.3% in Q3 2023, the highest in quite a while.

Beyond the cloud business, Amazon's advertising segment was growing at an annualized run rate of $50 billion and climbing. The Amazon Business B2B platform was another underrated growth driver, sitting at $35 billion in annualized gross revenues.

Here's what really stood out though - after years of overinvesting in capacity, Amazon was getting lean. Operating margins hit 7.8% in Q3 2023, the best since 2021. CEO Andy Jassy was clear they still had "a long way before being out of ideas to improve cost and speed." That efficiency focus meant bottom-line growth could outpace top-line growth, which is exactly what investors wanted to see.

So when you look at Amazon stock price trends and analyst positioning, the case was pretty straightforward: growth acceleration in advertising and AI, margin expansion from cost discipline, and a valuation that while rich at 43.8x forward P/E, still had runway compared to the company's growth prospects. Among FAANG peers, Amazon was getting the most bullish treatment while others faced headwinds. Worth keeping an eye on whenever you're scanning the broader tech landscape.