US President Joe Biden took advantage of the popular CBS program ’60 Minutes’ on Sunday to announce that the “pandemic is over”., This might be a good time to take a look at how Wall Street has behaved since February 2020 and the worst-performing stocks over the period.
according to an analysis Bespoke Investment GroupAt its peak on January 3, 2022, the S&P 500 rose more than 40% from its closing price on February 19, 2020, which was the index’s high before the COVID-19 crisis. After entering bear market territory in 2022, the index is currently up only 14% from this pre-pandemic high.
If you open the spectrum a little more for the Russell 1,000, another large-cap index, 41% of securities are now trading below their February 19, 2020 closing price, according to the analysis of these experts. 20% of index stocks are down more than 20%. “Given that two and a half years have passed, we think it is safe to say that any stock that is 20% below pre-Covid levels has been a ‘pandemic loser’.” At least at the moment,” Bespoke says.
Thus, if you look at stocks with a market capitalization of more than $15 billion, which are at least 20% lower than their closing price on February 19, 2020, there are some surprises. “Names like Boeing Company, Delta Air Lines, Uber Tech and Las Vegas Sands were some of the ‘lockdown losers’ that never really recovered, but other stocks that were initially seen as ‘lockdown winners’ were taken to Netflix. , Meta (Facebook), Spotify Tech, and Zoom Video”, highlight the bespoke investment analysts.
Boeing and Intel are the two biggest losers since the start of the pandemic, down more than 56%. Other highly affected blue chips are Biogen, Citigroup, General Electric, Verizon.com, 3M, Walt Disney, Adobe and Salesforce. “It is interesting that almost all sectors of the economy are represented in this list,” explains the expert. ,The only area not involved is energyWhich is crazy because this sector was the worst hit in the first days of Covid-19″, especially given that “oil price turned negative for a day”.
“Of course, the reason for the Covid is not all these large-cap stocks down that much since the pandemic started, but the performance numbers are the performance numbers, and there’s nothing to be done about it,” Bespoke said.
“Executives at big travel and leisure companies have always wished that Covid-19 had never happened, but more and more companies in sectors like technology thought the pandemic could change the rules of the game for them in a positive way. Big drops over two years wondering ‘what just happened’.
