A Nasdaq-100 exchange traded fund is set to end the year higher and gained ground Thursday despite worries over top holding (NasdaqGS: AMZN) and its 2012 outlook.
Thee online retailer’s shares recovered Thursday after a brief dive on speculation that the company may miss its sales targets.
Amazon is the eighth-largest holding in PowerShares QQQ (NasdaqGM: QQQ) at 3.2% of the ETF, which follows the Nasdaq-100.
Company shares fell as much as 4% in earlier trading Thursday after Goldman Sachs analysts estimated that the retailer would only see a 38% increase in sales this season, which is below the 40% Wall Street expectations and the 44% Goldman Sachs projections, report Phil Wahba and Alistair Barr for Reuters.
Amazon has historically outpaced holiday e-commerce sales growth by 23%. ComScore Inc. data revealed that U.S. e-commerce spending increased 15% in the first 56 days of the season, reports Beth Jinks for Bloomberg.
“While the comScore numbers are just one data point which does not capture international sales or breakout individual companies’ sales, taken alone they seem to suggest the potential for downside risk to consensus forecasts for 4Q 2011,” the analysts said.