Why Amazon's Stock Is Trading Higher Today

Amazon.com, Inc. AMZN shares are trading higher after Mizuho maintained a Buy rating on the stock and raised its price target from $3,100 to $3,450 per share.

Mizuho analyst James Lee attributes the Buy rating and price target increase to three potential positive catalysts:

1. New contract activity rebounded considerably to 85% of pre-COVID levels and is expected to accelerate in the second half of the year. Enterprises are becoming more urgent on cloud migration, with emphasis on database management, cybersecurity and automation.
2. Demand increased from core verticals such as financial services and retail. The biggest surprise was health care, which has been lagging in cloud computing, but COVID-19 accelerated adoption due to telemedicine and digitizing patient data.
3. "We believe that higher utilization for data migration to the cloud and database management applications is favorable for AWS as it has the largest infrastructure service, the most advanced technology, and a comprehensive ecosystem for native database management," Lee wrote in the note.

Amazon's stock was trading up 3.69% at $3,318.23 per share on Monday at the time of publication. The company has a 52-week high of $3,344.29 and a 52-week low of $1,626.03.