Here we go again? In November 1999, I titled our newsletter “The Amazon Flows Between a Rock and a Hard Spot.” Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) had just hit a high of $96.88 (split-adjusted.) Wall Street analysts all raced to the same side of the lifeboat fawning over the brilliance of Jeff Bezos and the unstoppable AMZN, which was going to show a profit “any day now.” By March 2001, Amazon was selling for $5.51.

Anyone listening to the Wall Street touts lost 90% of their investment (92.6%, but let’s not quibble.) In January 2000, I recommended shorting or selling Amazon. It was a fortuitous call. Will it happen again? No one can say for certain. Could it happen again? In my opinion — of course it can.

I like Amazon. I am an Amazon Prime subscriber. I love the two-day delivery, especially since I choose to live in a small Lake Tahoe community high in the Sierra Nevada with the nearest real brick-and-mortar stores more than an hour away on a wintertime snow day. I respect Jeff Bezos’ remarkable vision and cold-blooded pursuit of that vision. The idea of slashing expenses by abolishing retail outlets, simple in retrospect, has been revolutionary and crockery-breaking.

But it is not a model that withstands competition forever. The current huge moat Amazon has around itself is these days less about a revolutionary strategic vision than it is a first-mover advantage that allowed AMZN to raise cash by selling bonds below the rate of US Treasuries. As long as the company can use this massive cash hoard to buy competitors, enter newer more profitable businesses, and keep their expenses slashed to the bone, they will remain a dominant, if not particularly profitable, force to be reckoned with.

But at its recent price of $433 (and trailing earnings of minus 88 cents per share), AMZN has an analysts’ combined forward “estimated” PE of 97, zero dividend, a price/book value ratio of 18:1, an equity/asset ratio of 0.22, net margins of –0.4%, and an ROE of –3.84%. If ever there was a company priced for perfection, this is it.