── Why Not? ──
That's genuinely the question I ask myself every time I look at my portfolio and consider adding more to a position I already own. Why not? Is there a good reason NOT to buy more of this company? Have I learned something new that changes the thesis? Has the competitive landscape shifted in a way that makes the business less attractive? Has management lost the plot? If the answer to all of those is 'no' — and with Amazon, the answer has been 'no' for years — then the only question left is: do I have the money and do I want to add more? Yes. And yes.
I bought even more Amazon (AMZN) in the Trading 212 SIPP today. Not because something changed. Not because there was a dip to buy (the share price has been doing what share prices do — going up, going down, confounding short-term traders). Not because there was some new piece of news that suddenly made me think 'aha, NOW is the moment.' Because I had the money. Because I believe in the business. Because the long-term compounding thesis is as intact today as it was when I first bought Amazon shares. And because — to put it in the simplest possible terms — I think they know what they're doing. Big style.
── AWS: The Cloud Computing Backbone That Keeps Growing ──
Let's start with the obvious one, because it's the profit engine that funds everything else. AWS — Amazon Web Services — is the cloud computing backbone of a significant chunk of the internet. Netflix runs on AWS. Airbnb runs on AWS. Massive chunks of the UK government run on AWS. Startups you've never heard of launch on AWS every single day. It's the world's largest cloud provider by market share, and it's still growing at a pace that makes competitors weep.
The cloud isn't a mature business. It's not 'done growing.' Every year, more workloads move from on-premise servers to the cloud. Every year, more companies are born that never owned a server and never will. Every year, the amount of data being generated, processed, stored, and analysed increases by orders of magnitude. And AWS captures a disproportionate share of that growth. The margins are extraordinary — 30%+ operating margins on a business that generates tens of billions in revenue. The switching costs are enormous — once you've built your entire technology infrastructure on AWS, migrating to Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud is not a weekend project. And the competitive moat — the combination of scale, reliability, breadth of services, and developer ecosystem — is genuinely formidable.
And then there's AI. AWS isn't just a cloud provider. It's becoming an AI platform. Bedrock — AWS's managed service for building generative AI applications — gives companies access to models from Anthropic, Stability AI, AI21 Labs, and Amazon's own Titan models. SageMaker is the industry-standard platform for building, training, and deploying machine learning models. Amazon Q is an AI-powered assistant for software development and business intelligence. The AI revolution runs on cloud computing, and AWS is the biggest cloud on the block. Every dollar spent on AI workloads is disproportionately likely to end up in Amazon's pocket.
── The Everything Store (Literally Everything) ──
It's easy to take Amazon's e-commerce business for granted. We've all been ordering things from Amazon for so long that it feels like part of the furniture — like electricity, or running water, or the inevitable disappointment of a British barbecue. But step back and look at what they've actually built. A logistics network that can deliver millions of different products to millions of different addresses — often the same day, sometimes within hours. Fulfilment centres strategically placed within striking distance of most of the population. A last-mile delivery operation (Amazon Logistics, Flex, DSPs) that rivals or exceeds the postal services of most countries. An returns process so seamless that people order three sizes of the same item knowing they'll send two back.
None of this happened by accident. Amazon has spent decades and hundreds of billions of dollars building infrastructure that competitors can't easily replicate. Walmart is trying. Shopify is trying. But the sheer scale of Amazon's fulfilment network — the warehouses, the sorting centres, the delivery stations, the planes, the trucks, the vans, the algorithms that optimise every single step — is a moat so wide you can see it from space. Every time I order something from Amazon (and yes, I still order things from Amazon — I'm an investor, not a monk), I'm reminded of what they've built. The convenience is absurd. The selection is absurd. The speed is absurd. And they keep making it better.
── The Advertising Business Nobody Talks About Enough ──
Here's a fun fact that still surprises people when I mention it: Amazon's advertising business generated over $50 billion in revenue last year. Fifty. Billion. That's bigger than YouTube. Bigger than most standalone advertising companies. Bigger than the entire broadcast TV advertising market in most countries. And it's growing at 20%+ a year.
The beauty of Amazon's advertising business is that it's completely integrated with the shopping experience. When you search for 'wireless headphones' on Amazon, the first results you see are sponsored listings — ads. When you're on a product page, the 'related products' carousel includes promoted items. When you watch Prime Video, there are ads (unless you pay extra to remove them, which is also revenue). When you use a Fire tablet or Fire TV stick, there are ads on the home screen. Amazon has turned every square inch of its ecosystem into advertising real estate, and the targeting is better than almost anyone else's — because Amazon doesn't just know what you search for, it knows what you actually buy. That's the holy grail of advertising attribution. Did the ad lead to a purchase? Amazon knows. Yes. It did. Here's the receipt.
── The Irons in the Fire ──
One of the things I love most about Amazon as an investment is the sheer number of things they're working on. Not because diversification-for-the-sake-of-diversification is valuable. Because Amazon has a track record of planting seeds that take 5-10 years to grow and then suddenly they're massive businesses that nobody saw coming. AWS itself was a 'side project' that is now worth more than most companies on the FTSE 100 combined. Prime Video started as a 'nice bonus for Prime members' and is now a genuine streaming contender with Thursday Night Football, Lord of the Rings, and a growing slate of original content.
What's in the pipeline right now? Project Kuiper — a constellation of low-earth orbit satellites providing broadband internet to underserved areas. It's a direct competitor to Starlink, and if Amazon can pull it off (big if, but they've got the engineering talent and the balance sheet), it's another massive recurring-revenue business. Healthcare — Amazon Pharmacy, One Medical primary care, the Amazon Clinic telehealth platform. Healthcare in the US (and increasingly the UK) is a trillion-dollar industry that's crying out for technological disruption, and Amazon is quietly building a full-stack healthcare offering. Autonomous delivery — drones, sidewalk robots, all the sci-fi stuff that sounds like a gimmick until it isn't. Cashierless stores — Amazon Go and Just Walk Out technology that eliminates checkout queues entirely. Alexa with LLM integration — turning the smart speaker in your kitchen into an actually-intelligent assistant that can do more than set timers and tell you the weather.
Most of these will fail. Some will succeed. That's the model. Amazon plants 10 seeds knowing that if two become trees, the returns from those two will more than cover the cost of the eight that died. And one of the two that succeeds — look at the scale of AWS — can be worth hundreds of billions. The willingness to invest for the long term, to spend money on things that won't pay off for years, to tolerate failure as a cost of innovation — that's the Bezos DNA, and it's still very much alive in the company he built.
── Built for Decades, Not Quarters ──
This is the thing that separates Amazon from most publicly traded companies: it genuinely operates on a multi-decade time horizon. Most CEOs are trying to hit quarterly earnings targets so the stock doesn't drop and they keep their jobs. Amazon is building infrastructure for 2035 and 2040. The fulfilment network wasn't built for next quarter's Prime Day — it was built to dominate e-commerce for the next 30 years. AWS wasn't launched to boost next year's profits — it was launched to capture a multi-decade shift in how computing works. Kuiper isn't being built to generate revenue in 2026 — it's being built to own a piece of the global connectivity market for generations.
As a long-term investor — as someone who thinks about compounding over decades, not quarters — that's exactly the kind of company I want to own. I don't want to own a business that's optimising for the next earnings call. I want to own a business that's optimising for the next 20 years. I don't want management that's afraid of spending money on ambitious projects. I want management that's willing to look 'wasteful' in the short term if it means building something extraordinary in the long term. That's Amazon. That's always been Amazon. And that's why I keep buying more of it.
── Just Keep Adding ──
So here we are. Another top-up. Another small slice of one of the greatest compounding machines the business world has ever produced. Is the valuation reasonable? Depends who you ask and which multiple you're looking at. Is there risk? Of course there's risk — regulatory, competitive, execution, the possibility that Andy Jassy turns out to be less visionary than Jeff Bezos (so far the evidence suggests he's doing just fine). But the core thesis — dominant cloud platform + unmatched logistics network + growing advertising business + culture of long-term innovation + relentless execution — is intact. Has been for years. Shows no sign of changing.
Why not buy more? That's still the question. And the answer is still: I can't think of a good reason. So I bought more. Big style. Long-term compounding. Gotta be a winner.
As always, nothing on this site is financial advice. I'm a 66-year-old UK investor sharing what I do with my own SIPP. All investments carry risk, including the risk of losing money. Amazon (AMZN) is a single stock — it carries concentration risk, regulatory risk (antitrust scrutiny in the US, EU, and UK), competitive risk from Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Walmart, Shopify, and others, execution risk on capital-intensive projects like Kuiper and healthcare, and valuation risk. The share price can go down as well as up — sometimes by a lot, sometimes for a long time. Never invest in individual stocks with money you can't afford to lose. Do your own research. Understand what you're buying. I'm comfortable holding Amazon for the next decade or more. Make sure you would be too before doing anything similar.