Welcome to Super Bowl weekend, everybody. Have we all picked a winner yet? It should actually be a decent matchup for a change. I'm personally going to go with the Seahawks to cover the spread of one point (as of the latest look) in favor the Patriots. The odds line has been teetering a little on both sides for the past two weeks, and it may well teeter again before Sunday. Regardless, I think Seattle's going to be able to not just win, but cover whatever spread may develop in the meantime.... and not just because Tom Brady is going to be forced to play with fully-inflated footballs! Just for the record though, my Super Bowl picks haven't been all that great of late. Of course, picking the game's winner is one of the least interesting Super Bowl bets you can make this year. Take a look at some of this year's strangest/funniest bets you can make: Will Idina Menzel forget or omit at least 1 word of the official US National Anthem? (Yes +450/No - 700) How many times will "deflated" Balls be said during the game? (Over/under 3) How many times will Gisele Bundchen (married to Tom Brady) be shown during the game? (Over/under 1.5) You gotta love the fact that enough people even care about the offbeat stuff to even make these ideas an actual wager. In any case, whatever's in store for Sunday, I know at least a few of you are ending the workweek with a lot more money than you started it with. How's that? Those of you who are also members of the Elite Opportunity service that took John Monroe's tip of buying some Amazon.com (AMZN) calls are up big-time today thanks to the stock's 13% jump. Your return on a call option trade would vary depending on which strike price and expiry you chose, but with a $43 advance from the stock, a triple-digit gain on a call position would have been fairly easy to muster. Nice trade John! With that being said, John's good "trade" on Amazon.com is a perfect segue into my rant that Amazon.com is still anything but a good "investment". I'll confess to you right now I'm pointing this rant right at several of the post-announcement commentaries suggesting (1) the Q4 beat proves that all the recent capex is finally starting to pay off, and (2) the swing back to a profit proves n Amazon.com is focused on turning a profit again now that it's well-armed with lots of new-and-improved ventures. If you want some examples of these "everything is going to be great for Amazon from here on out" op-eds, this article links to several of them. To say I don't agree with those assessments would be un understatement. I've got a very good set of reasons why I feel it's way too soon to think Amazon.com has turned the corner. I only need one though, and it's this one.... Q4's so-called success for Amazon had everything to do with the busy Christmas shopping season, and nothing to do with any brilliant initiatives the company has taken on. Yes, Amazon generated $29.3 billion in sales last quarter, which was 14% better than the year-ago top line of $25.6 billion. We need to be real careful about holding up the fourth quarter's results as evidence of new strength though. Per-share income fell from 51 cents in Q4 of 2013 to only 45 cents this time around. Net income fell from $239 million in the last quarter of 2013 to $214 million in the fourth quarter of last year. You read that right - Amazon is doing less with more. It's not exactly the picture of success that's being painted by the headlines only focused on revenue growth. Some might argue 2014 was a year of transition, and you can't compare now to the way things were then. The only trouble with that theory is, these same people were saying the same thing after Q4-2013's results were posted, and were saying the same thing after Q4-2012's results were posted. Amazon is always in transition. That's the business model - spend heavily, make very little money for the effort, and then look for the next project to spend heavily on to reach the next tier of revenue. There is no end-game or exit plan or cash-cow phase for Amazon. I've just got a nasty feeling that the fourth quarter of 2015 is going to be the same thing.... more revenue, but not more earnings. Can the cycle ever really end? Just to paint a clear picture, take a look at the chart below. It shows you revenue, net income, and per-share income for the past nine years. Revenue has indeed been growing, spiking each Q4, and spurring a surge (relatively) in income for the same quarter. Net income isn't getting any bigger in Q4's though. Worse, the losses taken in the other three quarters of the year are getting progressively bigger, more than offsetting what little upside is being enjoyed in the fourth quarters. I really do hope Amazon can stop spending so heavily in the future and start to widen its margins. I just don't see it happening anytime soon though, as the company seems to be addicted to spending big for minimal growth, and its customers are addicted to cheap stuff. Old habits are hard to break. None of this is to say John Monroe made a bad call for Elite Opportunity subscribers. Quite the opposite, actually - he made a great call for EO members, because he knows how the market works in the real world. He saw the disconnect between the value of AMZN and the likely short-term reaction to underestimated earnings, and Elite Opportunity subscribers scored big-time on it. It was never more than a trade though. Amazon as an investment is still too wobbly for me. If you missed out on the AMZN call trade idea, be sure to not miss the next one. Sign up for the Elite Opportunity service now, and start getting stock picks and market insights at the beginning of the coming week. Here's the deal, or just cut and paste this link: https://www.smallcapnetwork.com/pages/SCNEO/v1/ We Couldn't Be Any Closer to an Implosion We've already gone a little long today, so we'll just push through the market analysis real quickly. There's not a lot to talk about anyway. First and foremost, I don't think the less-than-expected GDP growth rate for Q4 was the reason for today's sharp pullback. It may have been the catalyst, but not the reason. I've been saying for a while investors have been looking for a tangible reason to dump stocks, and they got a pretty good one today. Thing is, even with today's setback the market still isn't past the point of no return. We're close, but not quite there yet. The daily chart of the S&P 500 below illustrates this point. With today's 1.3% plunge and close at 1995.0, the index is right on the verge of a major lower low that's already been tested a couple of times this month. We've made a lower high in the meantime too, and the short-term moving average lines are falling now as well. Here's the weekly chart of the S&P 500, for perspective. You can see we're still putting pressure on the lower edge of the long-term rising support line, though we've yet to crack it yet. The VIX is also putting pressure on the ceiling at 21.5 again. What really worries me isn't the fact that stocks stumbled today. What grabbed my attention is how persistent the bears have been, barely letting the bulls up for air before dunking them again over the past month or so. It's not something to dismiss. The break happen as early as Monday. We'll see. I'm not particularly hopeful, though I'll definitely be using any steep pullback as a buying opportunity. That's it for now. Everyone have a great weekend.