The good
Some stocks boomed, and then kept booming. Etsy, the online marketplace for vintage gifts and homemade crafts saw its share price rise during the early days of the pandemic — and they haven't looked back since, gaining 555% since 2020. DocuSign, which lets organizations manage contracts and agreements electronically (no need to sign in-person), has also had a pretty smooth ride, up 257%.
But no company was the face of "pandemic winner" more than Zoom. The video-conferencing site has seen the shine come off pretty dramatically since last year, as expectations got ahead of the company's economic reality, but even so it's hard to put Zoom in any other bucket than "the pandemic was good for business".
The bad, then good again
Few sectors got hit as hard as travel. Online travel company Expedia saw its shares shed almost 60% of their value, but they've since made a roaring comeback, as lockdowns have faded and we booked all those vacations we missed out on. Airbnb had a similar experience, going through a brutal restructuring for its employees, before business picked up and the company managed to get its IPO done. Since then it's up 38%.
Live Nation Entertainment, which is the parent company of Ticketmaster and other live event platforms, also managed to weather the storm, gaining 57% since the start of 2020, despite the turbulence of the early pandemic.
The ugly
Airlines, like American Airlines and Delta, still aren't back to where they started, with many taking on debt or issuing equity to get them through the tough times of reduced air travel. Then there's Peloton, which has done an even more extreme version of Zoom. Technically, shares are still up 60% on where they were at the start of 2020, but with everything moving in the wrong direction at their recent results, and the company still burning cash, that might not last.
INFOSNACKS
- Why did Cambodian users account for 50% of global traffic for Facebook's Messenger voice function? Good story from Rest of World here.
- The top 25% most-active Twitter users are responsible for 97% of all tweets, according to data from Pew Research Center.
- Ever wondered what gets you through that first filter when applying for jobs? A software engineer experimented with how many buzzwords they could fit on their resume.
- Visa and Amazon are clashing over transaction fees, with Amazon banning Visa credit cards issued in the UK last week. If this spills over into the rest of retail it'll be a big deal — Visa accounts for 58% of the European payment network.
- IBM has announced the development of a 127-qubit quantum processor, almost doubling the previous record (64). Good explanation here of why that might mean massive leaps forward in computer processing power in the future.