Monday, October 26, 2020

Thoughts #22: The Curious Impact on COVID Sectors

COVID-19 has impacted various sectors in dramatic ways and yet benefitting totally different sectors altogether. This post tries to connect the dots and to crystallize some of these thoughts. Hope this helps!

1. Business and long distance travel. This will be impacted for a long time. Some say air traffic will not return to 2019 level even in 2024. As such, airlines are in a lot of trouble. Related to that, inflight meals (SATS), aircraft servicing (ST Engineering and SIA Engineering), hotels, tourism goods, luxury products, demand for gasoline, the whole aerospace industry, in short, the better half of Singapore's listed companies and even business travel solutions - SAP is down 20% in one day!

2. Social distancing. This has impacted restaurants, cinemas, live events, spectator sports, small businesses like massage parlors, pubs and related to that on-premise beer demand, liquor sales, soft drinks and the likes. Auto sales as well bcos you cannot buy a car without touching, feeling, test driving and sitting and talking with the dealer. That said though, Tesla is flying!

3. COVID winners. Conversely, the TMT^ sectors benefited big time. ZOOM, SAAS and remote work solutions took off. Amazon and Netflix benefited from shopping at home and more binge watching. Online learning boomed, together with ZOOM (decimating Pearson, the world's largest textbook seller along the way). Gaming is another big beneficiary and needless to say, vaccine related plays are also commanding sky high valuations.

So what to bet now? I will tend to focus on the beaten down ones to find the gems. Maybe JCNC can be an interesting recovery play when things settle down. People will need to buy their cars, bikes and finance such purchases for their livelihoods post COVID-19. There will be a lot of pent up demand for sure!

Looking back in history many years from now, this would be one of the most unique crisis that people will analyze for years. Let's try can still make some money despite some indices back to all time high! Might have room for STI to chiong. Huat Ah!

^ TMT stands for telco, media and tech. This was a buzz acronym in 2000 during the tech bubble.

Friday, October 09, 2020

Charts #35: Cybersecurity

This is one big growth area for the next five years.

Breaches have increased. Old chart - only until 2017. But should have kept going up.


Spending has increased and will continue to do so.

2019 was big. Well, 2020, with COVID, should have exacerbated the need for more security.

Buy HACK US - cybersecurity ETF. But do your own due diligence. Or check for my update here when I get down to do it.

Huat Ah!