Why Amazon's stock is strong

Apple has a bad earnings report and its stock crashes. Amazon has a bad one and its stock goes up.

What gives?

Here's the thing.

It's very easy to imagine Amazon at $1 trillion in revenues because it has a relatively predictable business with an obvious secular growth story.

More and more people are shopping online, and Amazon's obviously best of breed in ecommerce. It's a growth story that can logically go on for decades.

That builds confidence for the long run, and forgiveness for today.

Meanwhile, look at the tumultuous history of the tech landscape.

In the 1990s, Dell was absolutely killing it in terms of growth, Microsoft was the biggest bully on the block, and Apple was on the verge of going out of business.

Now, the PC industry's been turned upside down because of the iPad, and Microsoft is an underdog to Apple -- a company it actually rescued in 1997! And Apple itself is under attack from Google and Samsung!

What else?

There was a time when companies like Polaroid, Kodak, and Xerox were world-class innovators with seemingly unlimited growth potential.

How about IBM? It went from being a dominant superpower in the 1980s to a bloated mess in the early 1990s, before being resurrected in one of the greatest corporate turnarounds of all-time -- quite a roller coaster for what is now considered a "steady as she goes" type of profit machine.

There is a bull market in uncertainty, and Amazon has the perfect antidote: A dead-simple business model intensely focused on growing revenues into the stratosphere. It's just plain easy to imagine an Amazon that in 2030 is 10 or 20 times the size it is today. You can't do that with many other companies.