Stocks, Remote Work & Remote Work Stocks
Howdy y’all!
This week has felt like a long decade. The world seems to be moving at a pace that I can hardly keep up with (COVID-19, Politics, The Market, among other reason).
Here are few things that stuck out to me this week…
Many people are looking at the news far more than normal (myself included). In the past 30 days, the term “CNN” has been googled twice as much in the US. Interestingly, “Fox News” has only gone up about 20% in the same period. Unsurprisingly, “Coronavirus” has gone up 10x and “COVID-19”, 20x.
The Market had its worse day in 32 years this week, having to halt trading (twice) for 15 minutes as it hit a “circuit breaker” that is triggered due to extreme volatility. Bitcoin hasn’t been any better, dropping 45% in the last week.
Though the market has rebounded a good bit already today, as of 3pm EST, Friday the 13th
You’d think the “Remote Work” tools would all be seeing a lift. But no one was safe this past week, not even WFH’ers…
Last week, here’s what the Year-to-Date (YTD) gains looked like:
As of March 7th, 14/14 of the above companies were up YTD. Average value was up by 19% YTD.
Now only 4/14 are up YTD (and barely). And the average is now now only up 1%.
Update from the above tweet (3pm EST):
Zoom Video: up 55%
Teladoc Health: up 37%
Etsy: up 4%
Slack: down 22%
Domino’s Pizza: up 2%
Netflix: down 4%
Docusign: down 7%
Dropbox: down 4%
Costco: down 2%
BJ’s: even
Campbell Soup: down 2%
Grubhub: down 24%
Amazon: down 10%
Activision Blizzard: down 8%
It’s taken a lot of self-control not to sell this week.
No one can predict the market with complete confidence, and I am by no means a trained trader, so I definitely can’t. But, given the extreme conditions and uncertainty still ahead, it’s helpful to remind myself of the simple facts of when to buy and when to sell (TLDR: don’t panic sell!).
There have been a lot of WFH tips & tricks floating around.
ProductHunt (site for new products) launched YourStacks (site to show others what tools you have in you use) which put out a great article highlighting some less-known products that will help you settled into working remotely.
GitLab has a great guide on remote work. Zapier (remote team from launch) also has a solid guide. And finally, “Remote: Office Not Required”, the book by Basecamp founders (I’ve previously mentioned their other book: ReWork) is a timely read.
Finally, I’ve enjoyed watching companies take the opportunity to give back in this time of need.
Zoom’s CEO is giving K-12 Schools His Videoconferencing Tools for Free.
And Chinese founder of Alibaba is giving 500K test kits and 1M masks to the US.
I’m fascinated to observe what long-term effects these new work/education environments create within the digital connectedness of our current day-and-age.
Overall, I’m hopeful in this time of turmoil. I trust that we have smart folks working on solving this global pandemic, as soon as possible.
For now, keep washing your hands and get plenty of sleep to keep that immune system in tip-top shape!
See you next week,
Brendan J Short