Got an extra thousand bucks you’re ready to commit to a growth trade but aren’t sure what to invest it in? Such uncertainty wouldn’t exactly be surprising here. This is a different environment than yesteryear, after all. The so-called “Magnificent Seven” stocks that had been leading the market higher aren’t leading any longer, calling into question which — if any — are the next great stocks to own.

Just don’t read too much into the recent dynamic. The market ebbs and flows, including investors’ favorite names. Great companies remain great. Any short-term setbacks are buying opportunities.

To this end, if you’ve got $1,000 (or more) worth of idle cash you know you won’t be needing to access anytime soon, your best growth bet here is Magnificent Seven constituent Amazon (AMZN -0.68%). Here’s why.

Image source: Getty Images.

Bigger isn’t always better — but it certainly can be

Amazon is the e-commerce powerhouse of the Western world, accounting for roughly 40% of the United States’ online shopping spend. It reported revenue of $638 billion last year, up 11%. Of that, $59.2 billion was turned into net income. Few companies even come close to those kinds of numbers, which is why Amazon sports the world’s fourth-biggest market cap of just under $2.3 trillion.

Sheer size isn’t everything, though. Indeed, it can be a liability. Amazon is a complex company, with warehouses and distribution centers all over the world.

Its business model is also increasingly complicated. In addition to selling its own inventory along with third-party goods, Amazon manages an advertising business, a subscription-based streaming platform, a grocery store chain, and a cloud computing service that actually produces the bulk of its bottom line. Keeping all these moving parts working as one isn’t easy, while keeping them collectively competitive isn’t cheap.

It would also be naïve to pretend this company’s easiest and highest-growth days aren’t in the rearview mirror.

Still, this ticker’s got a ton of room left to continue growing nicely well into the distant future — if not indefinitely — thanks to the roots it planted back in 1995 when Jeff Bezos launched the company out of his garage. Just not for any of the tangible, clear-cut reasons you might think.

Better to fail than not even try

It’s a rarely discussed reality within the corporate world, and to be fair, it doesn’t always matter much. There are instances, though, where an organization’s ethos is at the heart of its success. That’s arguably the case for Amazon.

Give most of the credit to Jeff Bezos. Although he’s been critiqued by former and current employees as challenging to work for, most insiders who know him well enough to make such a judgment agree that his ability to turn a vision into a reality is nothing short of incredible, and magnetic.

That’s not a happy accident either, or merely coincidental. Bezos was working with a clear understanding of the business realities surrounding him. He wasn’t afraid to try an unlimited number of new things knowing many of them might end in failure — he understood that enough of them would pan out to make a meaningful difference. His only request was that in addition to “failing often,” experiments should “fail fast” so teams can move on to the next new project.

Bezos stepped down as CEO in mid-2021, handing the reins to then-Amazon Web Services chief Andy Jassy. This, of course, changed the company’s internal personality somewhat.

But it hasn’t changed it too much. Jassy is also a fan of speedy change, and encourages a “bias for action” even when the outcome of that action isn’t entirely certain.

And both chief executives insist on learning everything there is to learn from the company’s successes as well as its failures, leaving Amazon with at least something of value even for its failed efforts.

Enough successes “stick”

Mindsets and corporate personalities in and of themselves don’t generate revenue or profit. Only sales of products and services can do that. The creation of new products and services, however, is only possible when an organization is willing take risks over and over again.

And Amazon is. That’s how it became the titan that it is today.

Case in point: Amazon Web Services. The company’s cloud computing arm wasn’t launched until 2006 — well after its e-commerce operation was thriving, but well before the world recognized just how important cloud computing was about to become. That experiment worked.

So did 2005’s debut of Amazon Prime, along with the recent ramp-up of its digital advertising business that monetizes Amazon.com’s web traffic in a whole new way.

AMZN Revenue (Quarterly) data by YCharts

Not every developmental project worked as well as hoped, to be clear. Nobody was interested in the Fire smartphone, for example, while the localized daily deals/couponing platform called Amazon Local was shut down in 2015 after four years of lethargic consumer interest. Indeed, Amazon may have failed more often than it’s succeeded. It’s just willing to end what’s not working and double-down on what is. There’s a surprising number of companies that think — and act — in the exact opposite manner.

The right company to handle such flexibility

But is such an ethos reason enough to step into a stake in Amazon stock right now, or for that matter, any company ever?

There’s certainly more to picking great stocks than mere philosophy. General Electric used to be much like Amazon, for example, in that it could manage many different businesses and was willing to venture into new ones when the opportunity was right. That ultimately didn’t work out so well for the organization, though. GE has since been split up into several different stand-alone companies, mostly as a means of compartmentalizing what was essentially its collapse.

Amazon is distinctly different than the General Electric of yesteryear. This is an asset-light and low-debt company built from the ground up to thrive on change. It could be just as fairly viewed as a private equity outfit, with the flexibility and capacity to adapt to whatever unknowns the future may hold. That can’t be said of most other companies, many of which are too narrowly focused and lack the willingness or ability to at least try new and weird things.

Of course, the fact that Amazon stock is still 12% below its February peak provides a quantitative reason this name’s a buy here, in addition to the qualitative reason there’s never really a bad time to step into this perennial powerhouse.

Bottom line? Don’t be afraid to buy companies based on a compelling corporate culture. In some well-proven cases like this one, that’s enough.