Investors should avoid making decisions about this stock based on a single time horizon.Amazon (AMZN 0.22%) has generally served as a market stalwart since it launched its IPO in 1997. The company pioneered e-commerce in the U.S. and much of the developed world and later spawned the cloud computing industry as a side effect of its efforts to make e-commerce more widely available.Consequently, it is one of the largest and most respected stocks on the market today, and its place among the so-called "Magnifice ...

The giant of a company clearly can't live up to the incredibly high standard of its impressive past, but...E-commerce giant Amazon (AMZN -2.61%) has certainly turned several patient investors into millionaires since its public offering in 1997.But it would be naïve to pretend that the stock's 230,000% gain since then wasn't rooted in extraordinary circumstances. That's the proliferation of the internet, of course, paired with founder Jeff Bezos' vision of how the internet would become a powerful shopping me ...