There was amazing news last week where Pfizer and BioNTech revealed that their Covid vaccine is proving to be 90% effective in phase-3 trials, and this was swiftly followed-up by similar news from Moderna.
This is an amazing achievement. Vaccines usually take several years to develop, but buoyed up by the fast-track processes instituted by many governments, Pfizer and Moderna expect to have ‘emergency use authorisation’ from the FDA by the end of this month.
The journey from having a successful vaccine to full global rollout is a long one, but it’s optimistically anticipated that several billion doses will have been administered by the end of 2021, which will be sufficient to turn the tide and begin to truly achieve herd immunity in the majority of countries.
In early 2020, Albert and I pivoted our portfolios to weather the Coronaconomy storm, increasing our investment in several key ‘work from home’ companies, including e-commerce stocks such as Shopify and MercadoLibre, remote working companies like Zoom, Docusign and Fiverr, and telemedicine companies such as Teladoc.
Although 2020 has been a tough year for many companies, this part of our portfolios has done incredibly well, yielding stellar year-to-date returns:
- Fiverr +677% (but admittedly, we were very late to this party!)
- Zoom +480%
- Docusign +174%
- Shopify +125%
- Teladoc +112%
- MercadoLibre +110%
With the announcement of multiple strong vaccine candidates now in the final stages of the development pipeline, we expect our Coronaconomy stocks to take a bit of a bashing in the short- to medium-term, however, it’s our intention to hold the course with all of these investments.
The Coronavirus pandemic has accelerated the take-up of e-commerce and remote working across a broad range of society, as many people have been forced to shop, and to work, online. Although we’re all looking forward to getting back to a semblance of normal pre-Covid life as soon as possible, we’ve all realised efficiencies and flexibility in our own lives that we’re very unlikely to walk-back when the virus is in the rearview mirror.
- Who would honestly prefer the headache of physically printing, signing, scanning & emailing a contract – or the minor inconvenience of licking an envelope (yuck!) and walking it to the post-box, when you can achieve the same thing – in a far more secure manner – with a click on your phone?
- Who honestly doesn’t enjoy the flexibility of a day or two a week working from home, even if it is nice to be in the office environment and socialising with colleagues on the other days?
- Does anybody really enjoy shopping for essentials every week, rather than having groceries and those little bits and pieces delivered – especially when the delivery capability of most e-commerce providers can now get the goods to you within two days (or in some locations, two hours)?
We expect fairly wild volatility in all of our Coronaconomy stocks as vaccines roll-out over the next twelve months, but many of these companies have leveraged national lockdowns to move their strategy forwards by years. These are not trends that we anticipate reversing, and we’re looking forward to seeing how all of these companies evolve and expand in the years to come.
Albert and I regularly use the Telescope Investing podcast to share our thoughts and investment ideas on the megatrends we’re tracking, and you can hear more about the sectors mentioned in this article at the following links:
E-commerce: https://telescopeinvesting.com/podcast-11-alternatives-to-amazon/
Biomedicine: https://telescopeinvesting.com/podcast-13-investing-in-biomedicine/
Mobile working: https://telescopeinvesting.com/podcast-8-investing-in-the-trend-of-mobile-working/
If you enjoyed this content and would like to be the first to hear about the other megatrends we’re tracking, you can subscribe and join the Telescope community here.
