The Covid-19 pandemic, which consumed every moment of our waking days and claimed more than a million lives in the United States alone, had a unique impact on financial markets. One that, in my opinion, is here to stay.
It was not the pandemic itself, but the double whammy of loose monetary conditions and an increase in speculative trading in the stock market. That’s what may shape the rest of this decade. The liquidity genie simply won’t be going back into the bottle anytime soon.
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One of the iconic stocks of that life-changing era was Moderna (ARNM). As a reminder, here is your company description on Barchart’s Key Statistics page.
Moderna, Inc. is a clinical-stage pharmaceutical company, primarily focused on discovering and developing messenger RNA (mRNA)-based therapies. The company’s mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine, Spikevax (mRNA-1273), is approved for use in adults in the United States. The vaccine is also authorized for emergency use in several countries…
The MRNA price chart from that time, 5 or 6 years ago, is a classic case of a stock being discovered directly due to a market event and then disappearing off the map. But in the case of mRNA, there is at least a glimpse of a second coming.
This was the mRNA pandemic outbreak. Shares went from less than $30 to more than $350. In 18 months!
Looking at more recent history, the stock has been at or below half that high for almost two years. This was not a dotcom era story, but it looks like it is on the price chart. The glass-half-full types will look at this and say “a double in six years, that’s more than 10% a year.”
Yes, but that doesn’t exactly tell the story, does it?
Hantavirus rekindles optimism about mRNA stocks. But should you buy it now?
Moderna shares have surged recently, gaining as much as 22% in a two-day span as investors scramble to take advantage of the emerging hantavirus threat. The catalyst was a deadly cluster of cases linked to an Atlantic cruise ship, which resulted in three deaths and sparked international headlines. While the World Health Organization (WHO) was quick to point out that human-to-human transmission remains rare and that this is not “the beginning of another pandemic,” the 2020 market’s muscle memory is clearly twitching.
