Many industries stand to be ravaged from the coronavirus pandemic - most obviously the travel industry, events organizers, and so on.
But a select few will prosper from it, just as a select few prospered from the Great Depression.
Which industries and what kind of entrepreneurs do you think will be able to succeed in the midst of this disaster?
Pretty much anything related to fighting the virus or figuring out how to live with it.
Any company making sanitizers, cleaning/disinfecting supplies, should be expected to have their products in high demand until this thing is brought under control.
Any company that patents and/or produces a vaccine should do well. Even if they’re charging a modest profit margin, there will be global demand for their product - literally billions of units to be made and sold.
Manufacturers of IT equipment that facilitates telework are suddenly finding their products in high demand. As infrastructure for telework expands to accommodate the surge in demand, and more people gain experience with it, we may find that telework becomes more popular/common even after coronavirus gets conquered.
A neighbor told me once that he works in the markets, and that he profits from volatility. He doesn’t care whether it is moving up or down, just that it moves. In brief times of big changes, he can make the majority of his year’s income. I imagine he’s doing quite well these past weeks.
The people who have diverse stock holdings and are in it for the long term.
That would be us:D
Any service for internet based meeting platforms. Based on the number of meetings I have via Zoom this week (mostly about covid response).
The same people who benefitted from the 2008 crash. People with large amounts of liquid capital who can buy up assets at a discount then resell them when the economy turns around a few years from now.
Young people who have a long enough timeframe to have time in the market. I myself made out very well through several financial crises just by staying in it and dollar cost averaging all the way down and then all the way back up. It worked in the eighties, it worked in the nineties, during the dot com thing, the Great Recession, and I expect it will work now, although I may not have the time to recover as I am in the distribution phase and not the accumulation phase.
There are opportunities available here, even for people in retirement who don’t have large amounts of capital. For example, converting a portion of a conventional IRA to a Roth will result in a tax hit, but if you do it at the bottom all of the growth on the rebound can be tax free. Check your own tax situation before you do this, I’m on Medicare and have to stay under a certain income to avoid a surcharge on my Medicare cost.
Car insurance companies. Nobody out driving.
Marijuana dispensaries.
Ugh - funeral homes?
The Graduate was told, “One word: Plastics.” My one word would be, “Vaccines”.
Not on a mega-scale, but look for makers exploiting:
[ul]
[li] A boom in mandatory strap-on bio-telemetry that, if not hacked, accurately displays the wearer’s body temperature, pulse, BP, and whatever else it can meter. Antibody status might be difficult.[/li][li] A rush in sanitary tissues, but in a Green direction, not chopping down more forests but pulping hemp, kelp, maize corn waste, anything fibrous. And more wastes recycled into food packaging for sanitized shopping.[/li][li] A surge in 3D printers and stock, so products can be obtained with zero physical external contact. And total robotization of most production facilities. Thus a huge spike in numbers of the permanently unemployed.[/li][li] More networked musical instruments and electronics so performers and audiences need share a physical presence.[/li][li] One more word: Teledildonics.[/li][/ul]
I won’t guess which sorts of financial players will score big, except maybe survivors and estates of careless wealthy seniors.
Sorry, missed edit window. That next-to-last list item should have been:
More networked musical instruments and electronics so performers and audiences need not share a physical presence.
Citrix stock has really jumped. My friend is a director there and says they’re getting a lot of inquiries - the value of being able to work remotely is, shall we say, even more evident.
Amazon and any company heavy into home delivery.
As for the market, anyone who doesn’t sell right now.
Honestly, this is BS peddled by the brokerage industry. I know, I worked for UBS and Lehman Brothers back in the 90’s. Maybe, just maybe, it holds true in “normal” times. These are not normal times.
Any one should be able to see right now that the global economy is going in the shitter. The China supply chain is at risk. The stock market is at about the level of when trump took office. The risk is really high that the markets drop to somewhere around the Great Recession clearing levels, which is far south of where we are now.
Even if you have a 20 year investment horizon, why would you “stay in for the long term”? Go to cash and then buy the bluest of blue chips in about 12 months. Or if you’re really scared about missing the “rebound”, then buy the bluest of the blue chips in about 6 months. In 12 months, the odds are about 99% one will know who is actually a blue chip, and the share price will be less than it is today.
Absolutely, if you have it, one should be squirreling away cash every month. Then slowly start to buy back in sometime in the future. It took, what, at least 10 years for hold for the long term to recover from the great recession. Or let me frame it a different way: a stock that falls 50% then has to double to breakeven. How many of your stock holdings have doubled? YMMV
A lot of big chains will probably benefit. Sure, they will lose some business in the short term but most of them will have the reserves to survive a bad sales period. Small independent stores, on the other hand, will go out of business and that means when the economy recovers, the big chains will have less competition.
Toilet paper manufacturers
I think they played CBGBs in 1979. 
Actually, I think they will suffer. The virus is not causing people to use more toilet paper, just to hoard toilet paper. The manufacturers will spend a lot of money to ramp up production, but soon America’s supply closets will be overflowing with toilet paper and nobody will be buying TP for the next few years.
Now if there were something about the virus that caused consumers to use more TP rather than just hoard it, that would be different.
Don’t forget Senators like Burr, Loeffler, et al. Loeffler even was smart enough to buy into Citrix.
It took nothing like ten years to recover from the Great Recession. On the first trading day of 2008, January 3 the S&P closed at 1447.16. By March 09, 2009 at the bottom the S&P index reached 676.53. You’re correct, that’s more than a 50% drop. So how long did it take to recover? On September 13, 2012 the S&P closed at 1459.99, above where it was at the start of the recession. That’s only three and a half years from the bottom to recovery.
If you simply kept dollar cost averaging and bought all the way down and all the way back up you were whole way earlier than that because you had the benefit of buying more shares at the bottom. I just looked at my records. Between January 1, 2008 and January 1, 2009 my 401k lost 32.2% of its value, and that’s with me buying as hard as the law allowed, but I didn’t have to wait until 2012 to get even. Between January 1, 2009 and January 1, 2010 my 401k gained over 50%. Those weren’t all market gains, again, I spent 2009 buying as hard as I could, but the balance was positive even after deducting the fresh capital infused in 2008 and 2009.
The best thing to do when stocks are on sale is to buy stocks. Don’t try to time the market, don’t try to call the bottom, just buy all the way down and all the way up. If the drop in equities has unbalanced your portfolio rebalance, which will mean buying more stocks, but that’s OK, stocks are cheap.
If you’re not in the accumulation phase but in the distribution phase and are withdrawing money from your accounts for monthly expenses you can preferentially take money from your cash or bond accounts to avoid selling stocks into a downturn and rebalance that way.