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Investors are going back to the exercise company Peloton, one of their stay-at-home champions.
Courtesy Peloton
Egads, here we go again.
The stock market is getting shellacked, pressured by an alarming spike in Covid-19 cases, in particular among the unvaccinated. The
Nasdaq
Composite, off more than 1%, is on track for its fifth straight down day—the worst losing streak since October.
Faced with a familiar threat, investors have reacted in predictable fashion, and are fleeing to the same stay-at-home plays that flourished a year ago.
Here’s where they’re heading as the pandemic reasserts itself:
Online retailers: Investors are buying up some of the biggest beneficiaries of the pandemic era, including the pet food seller
Chewy
(CHWY), which is up 6%, further retailer
Wayfair
(W), up 4%; handicraft market
Etsy
(WTSY), a major seller of masks, up 3%, and online shopping software giant
Shopify
(SHOP), up 2%.
Cloud computing: The pandemic accelerated adoption of cloud computing, boosting the so-called digital transformation trend.
DocuSign
(DOCU),
Okta
(OKTA),
Snowflake
(SNOW),
PagerDuty
(PD), and
(ASAN) are all trading modestly higher.
PC makers: Working from home and remote learning drove up demand for personal computers, and while there have been concerns that growth is moderating, the caseload spike has perked up interest in the stocks again. Both
HP Inc.
(HPQ) and
(DELL) are trading fractionally higher.
The usual suspects: These stocks are the stay-at-home champions:
Teledoc
(TDOC) is up 2%,
Peloton
(PTON), up 6% and
Roku (ROKU),
up 1%.
Write to Eric J. Savitz at eric.savitz@barrons.com