Covid Winner Stocks Enjoy a Day in the Sun

A Wall Street trader during last week's sell off. Photo by Bloomberg.

Uh-oh, put that mask back on: The stock market is acting like Covid-19 is back. Amid a topsy-turvy day on the stock market, when a big sell-off gave way to a modest rally, one group of companies rallied strongly—the Covid winners. Zoom Video, Pinterest, Peloton, Spotify, Shopify, Roku and Netflix—all of which got pummeled mercilessly in recent months as the pandemic retreated—were each up 5% or more today. In case you locked the memory of 2020 in a portion of your brain you never want to revisit, those were all businesses that benefited from lockdowns. It seems traders are taking news of the latest Covid variant surge seriously.

It’s likely not a coincidence that the stocks of Uber and Lyft sold off today by around 3.5% each. Both are synonymous with ride hailing, a sector that Covid devastated, although investors may have forgotten that Uber’s UberEats operation is now as big as its ride-hailing business. Also dropping a little was Airbnb, whose booming travel accommodation business would suffer from another surge. The one outlier in this Covid-trend theory is Amazon, which for most of the day was down a couple of points, although it recovered to end the day up 0.2%. Amazon was, of course, the biggest Covid winner of all for the first year or so of the pandemic. Yes, the e-commerce giant really has lost its halo as far as investors are concerned.