The holiday quarter starts in about two weeks. And for e-commerce companies, it’s the three months that matter most. Consider Shopify (NASDAQ:SHOP). The e-commerce software company earned $631 million of operating income in last year’s fourth quarter — 43% of its operating income for all of 2025.
Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) and MercadoLibre (NASDAQ:MELI) lean on the season, too, though not nearly as hard. Notably, all three companies close their books on Dec. 31, so the December quarter is the fourth quarter for each.
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Here’s a closer look at all three stocks ahead of the season.
The biggest holiday swing
Shopify’s concentration isn’t a one-off. The fourth quarter delivered 43% of the company’s operating income in both 2025 ($631 million of $1.47 billion) and 2024 ($465 million of $1.08 billion). Not only is the holiday quarter the company’s biggest for revenue (about 32% of 2025’s total), but it’s also the year’s most profitable by a wide margin. Operating expenses don’t rise with the holiday rush the way merchant sales do, so much of the season’s extra gross profit can turn into operating income.
And I think this year’s setup looks even better. Second-quarter gross merchandise volume (the value of goods sold across the platform) rose 32% year over year, a fifth straight quarter of growth above 30%. Operating income climbed 68% to $488 million. In fact, profit growth has been accelerating: Operating income rose 37% in 2025, and it’s rising much faster this year. For the third quarter, management guided for revenue growth in the low-thirties percentage range.
The problem, however, is the stock’s price.
Shopify shares have pulled back sharply, from a 52-week high above $182 to about $130 as of this writing. Yet the stock still costs about 53 times what the company is expected to earn next year.
Amazon’s holiday quarter matters less than it used to
The e-commerce giant still gets a seasonal lift. Fourth-quarter operating income of $25 billion last year was about 31% of the full-year total of $80 billion, a share almost unchanged from 2024. But Amazon’s profit engine is increasingly its cloud computing business, Amazon Web Services, which doesn’t depend on the shopping calendar.
Profit growth is accelerating, too. Operating income rose 17% in 2025, then rose 43% to $27.5 billion in this year’s second quarter. And for the third quarter, management guided for operating income of $22.5 billion to $26.5 billion, up from $17.4 billion a year earlier.
