Tech giants Alphabet and Amazon are neck and neck in the race to $1,000 a share, with both stocks opening Monday trading between $955 and $960. But chart-minded trader Todd Gordon believes that Alphabet is likely to hit quadruple digits first.
Gordon first tackles the question by examining the "ratio" of one stock to another. Dividing the share price of Alphabet by the share price of Amazon yields an upward-moving line, "indicating the outperformance of Google relative to Amazon," he explained Monday on CNBC's "Trading Nation."
Such outperformance could suggest that Alphabet continues to be the better bet. But as Gordon also points out, the line has flattened in the last few weeks as Amazon continued to hit new highs while Alphabet has more or less consolidated.
Gordon next turns to the stock charts of both.
"What's of concern here is Amazon has already tried to make the move, and we're starting to see some hesitation," he said. "What I mean is we have three pushes [that happened over the past few weeks], and it feels like Amazon is starting to run out of momentum here."
On the other hand, the consolidation in Alphabet leads Gordon to believe that a breakout is on the way for the tech giant. "It seems to be that Google is ready to break this consolidation, push higher and probably reach $1,000," he said. "So it's just kind of the idea of Google sort of waiting for the correct time."
In order to capitalize on a move to $1,000, Gordon favors selling a put spread on Alphabet. This is an options trades that gives the trader some money
To be sure, not everyone is betting on Alphabet. Monday on CNBC's "Squawk Alley," Elevation Partners co-founder Roger McNamee made the case that Amazon's increasing dominance could eventually spell trouble for ad-reliant tech giants.
"Eventually they're going to be such a large percentage of the retail business that when Facebook and Google are going to try to sell ads the only guy on the other side is going to be Amazon," giving Facebook and Alphabet little pricing power, McNamee said.
