A winner has emerged in the FANG trade.
Netflix topped the group in 2018 with a 39 percent rally, blazing past runner-up Amazon, which gained 28 percent and Facebook and Google parent Alphabet, which ended the year in the red.
Netflix was down 2.4 percent in Wednesday’s premarket after SunTrust Robinson Humphrey said the streaming giant added fewer subscribers than expected last quarter.
A different FANG stock could be best poised to take over Netflix as best performer in 2019, according to Gina Sanchez, CEO of Chantico Global.
“I would actually say that the Amazon story is even stronger because they’re not just about selling content,” Sanchez said on CNBC’s “Trading Nation ” on Monday. “Amazon Web Services is massive. They continue to do battle with bricks-and-mortar and they continue to make progress, so I actually think the Amazon story is still interesting.”
Its cloud-computing arm Amazon Web Services, for example, has had explosive growth in recent years, helping Amazon diversify its sources of revenue. The unit reported 46 percent sales growth in its September-ended quarter and now generates 10 percent of the company’s total revenue. However, Amazon also was down 2 percent just ahead of the first trading day of 2019.
Craig Johnson, chief market technician at Piper Jaffray, also says Amazon looks strong.
“The retailing giant is still in the driver’s seat position,” he said on “Trading Nation” on Friday. “I look at the chart here, and it looks like just another correction back to identifiable support. So this is a name that I think you’re going to see a lot of investors gravitate toward.”
Amazon shares bottomed at $1,307 on Christmas Eve, its lowest level since February. Since then, it has bounced 15 percent.
Johnson says Netflix should continue to rise in 2019.
“The longer-term uptrend is still intact despite the sell-off, despite the weakness you’ve seen in the overall FANG stocks,” said Johnson. “The way that it’s pulled back right to identifiable support at the lower end of the channel, I think you’ve got to step up and you’ve got to be buying the stock in here as it looks like again the uptrend is still intact, and the trend is our friend until it’s not.”
Netflix has remained within its multiyear channel stretching back to the beginning of 2013. Its shares have exploded 1,923 percent over that six-year stretch.