With Zoom, DocuSign, and Peloton all making headlines in the last week, you’d be forgiven for thinking that it was 2020 and the pandemic was still raging. However, unlike the days of COVID, most of the headlines are negative: Zoom has seen revenue growth slow to a glacial 3% year-on-year — and even called workers back to the office in 2023 — DocuSign has been the rumored target of private equity bidders, and at-home fitness provider Peloton announced a refinancing as it looks to avoid a “cash crunch”.
And those 3 aren’t the only pandemic stock market darlings that have been struggling recently.
Everything old is new again
4 years on from when COVID first upended our daily routines, some commutes have remained walks to the home office, but much of daily life has reverted to pre-COVID norms — and the stocks that benefited most from the pandemic have come back down to Earth too.
We’ve checked in on the share prices of 6 COVID winners… every single one of them is down significantly from their pandemic peak, as investors grapple with a reality that hasn’t quite lived up to the heightened “new normal” expectations. Moderna, the biotech firm that played a pivotal role in ushering life back to normalcy, has seen its shares plummet over 1,700% as demand for its vaccines and boosters has waned while Wayfair, the online home goods retailer, is now pivoting toward brick-and-mortar stores in an effort to reignite growth.
