TMT Analyst Nick Sant Foster ’22 broke down the recent performance of our technology, media, and telecom holdings. The winners included; PayPal, Apple, Microsoft, and the gaming giant Activision Blizzard. PayPal is up roughly 72% on the year after they displayed incredibly strong earnings growth. PayPal has greatly benefited from the explosion in E-commerce during the pandemic, and the popularity of Venmo. The second biggest winner of the sector was Apple, which is up ~58% YTD. This has been a big year for Apple, they had their highly anticipated Stock Split in August and a new iPhone release in September. Microsoft has also experienced impressive gains, up ~32% YTD. Their Commercial and Cloud Services have flourished throughout the pandemic due to the work from home environment, and they released the new Xbox Series X in early November. Activision Blizzard is another success story of the pandemic, rising ~29% YTD and experiencing user base growth of 30% YOY. They have also seen their Call of Duty series rebound, with the popularity of Warzone and the release of Call of Duty: Cold War. The losers of the group included China Mobile down ~29% with a declining cash position, AT&T down ~27% and facing large 5G Competition, Intel which has been crushed ~25%, and Cisco down ~15%.
Co-President Noah Grossman ’21 analyzed the hectic week in markets. Moderna announced this past week that their vaccine reduced the risk of Covid-19 infection by 94.5%. Stocks rallied on this positive vaccine news but caution still remains among investors over rising Covid-19 cases. Pfizer also announced that their vaccine was 90% effective earlier in the week, however, their CEO sold $5.6 million worth of Pfizer stock on the day of the announcement. This obviously raised some eyebrows but Bourla claims that it was just a scheduled and routine sale. Shares of Tesla jumped to new highs after it was added to the S&P 500 index. Another big story has been the return of Bitcoin. Bitcoin has been on an absolute tear, skyrocketing over 79% since early October and reaching its levels from 2017/2018. Is another crash coming or is the cryptocurrency finally here to stay? Noah also took a look at market trends during and after election years. Equity and bond markets tend to underperform typical 12-month trends during an election year, and following an election year stock markets have a habit of closing slightly lower, while bond markets on the other hand tend to outperform. When the Incumbent party wins, the stock market returns an average of 6.5%, but when the opposite party wins the market returns just an average 5%.
Co-President Alec Cwienkala ‘21 announced that the club will be holding another Stock Market Game over the Winter break. The game will start on November 23rd and it will end on February 15th. The winners will receive prizes and get to present their successful trading strategies to the club.
Thank you to all of our members, guest speakers, and everyone who helped make this another great semester for the club!