The online retailer Etsy, which suddenly became a key source of homemade masks, jumped 300 percent. It was a disparate group of stocks: Shares of Zoom Video were up nearly 400 percent last year while Peloton rose about 470 percent.

“The stay-at-home stocks were the place to be because that was where the growth was,” said Eric Mintz, portfolio manager at Eagle Asset Management, an investment firm in St. The logic was fairly straightforward: As the economy went through one of the worst economic shocks on record, these companies seemed like they’d be able to grow profitably through, and perhaps because of, the crisis. Many of them bought shares in the products they were being exposed to for the first time, like Peloton, or those they were using more frequently, like Clorox.

But he added, “Our long-term thesis of fitness moving into the home is unchanged.”Īs lockdowns forced much of the country to stay home - often with ample extra money from government stimulus and little else to do - millions of neophytes tried their hand at trading stocks. Peloton’s chief executive, John Foley, said on a conference call with analysts that the company knew it would be a challenge to duplicate the results it had during the peak of the pandemic. Peloton dived 35 percent in a single trading session this month, after it deeply cut its sales forecast for the coming year. That has been bad news for the share prices of some of last year’s hottest stocks. “We’re in a full reopening, and we’re moving toward a normalized situation.” “The markets clearly sense the pandemic is over,” said Ben Emons, managing director of global macro strategy for Medley Global Advisors.

But as the economic reopening gains speed - aided by rising vaccination numbers and promising new treatments for those who get sick - some of the stocks at the center of the so-called stay-at-home trade collapsed. Shares of companies like Peloton and Zoom Video, the online conference software that replaced face-to-face communications for countless schools and businesses, were darlings of the stock market for the better part of last year. What happens now that they can get the real thing again? With jumbo screens and upbeat instructors, being on them mimicked the experience of an in-person spin class in their living rooms. Peloton’s pricey exercise bikes were the hot product for fitness buffs in the early days of the pandemic.

Zoom video stock