Whether Vaccine Day – as our trading columnist Michael Taylor has dubbed it on page 20 – was lucky for investors is less clear. Lockdown losers may have seen big bounces – take railway station pasty specialist SSP, for example, whose shares jumped 75 per cent this week as investors salivated at the prospect that stations may once again be busy with commuters, or debt-laden Cineworld, up by roughly the same amount. But on the flipside, the so-called lockdown winners – stocks such as silver-screen nemesis Netflix, which have done well on the premise that we will all remain under house arrest for some time yet, or offer some solution to tackling Covid-19 on the front line – sold off sharply. Zoom plummeted as airlines and office landlords soared. Companies such as Novacyt that have been bid up as winners from the Covid clean-up were unceremoniously dumped.
This switcheroo unsurprisingly caught many investors off guard – and in the stampede to take advantage many in the UK were left unable to trade. As Dave Baxter writes on our website, large platforms such as Hargreaves Lansdown and AJ Bell were overwhelmed by the surge in volume and closed for much of Vaccine Day. Angry traders blamed a lack of investment in their infrastructure by the big providers, but this perhaps fails to recognise that large, general-purpose platforms were never going to cope well in such crazy – and rare – markets: station wagons on a day where you needed a sports car.
Vaccine Day has also been marked by many as the day on which the long-awaited rotation from growth to value finally happened. I am not so sure – this felt like less of a rotation than a snapback rally pulled in two directions by a fear of losses or missing out; rotations suggest to me more of a steady, orderly shift. And as Chris Dillow writes on page 14, the euphoria over the possible end of months of economic agony may have temporarily caused investors to forget that there is a long way to go yet – especially as the vaccine itself is far from approved and will not be easily delivered if it is, as Megan Boxall writes online.
In the end, Vaccine Day once again highlights, as I have been saying for some time, that many investors appear to be in the throes of Covid-induced cognitive dissonance – so much for those permanent behavioural shifts talked about since the pandemic began, we will now be back into the office in a shot and gobbling late-night pasties once more. Of course, like everyone, I hope that a vaccine can restore our pre-Covid lives – but it is the markets where a dose of normality is needed most.
