By Dhirendra Tripathi
Investing.com – Shares of Zoom Video (NASDAQ:ZM) and Peloton (NASDAQ:PTON), two of the biggest winners of the pandemic, were trading higher in Friday’s premarket as emergence of a new variant of the Covid-19 virus in South Africa raised fears that countries could bring back restrictions on movement of people.
Zoom stock traded 9% higher while Peloton was up 7%, riding on fear and hope that individuals may again be hesitant to step out and prefer using home-based systems to communicate and exercise, respectively.
Companies, which were considering reopening their offices, may have a re-think, and continue to let their staff work from home for longer, using services like Zoom for communication purposes.
Zoom and Peloton were big early beneficiaries of the shift the pandemic brought, but the shares have given up most of their gains as the economy has reopened – Zoom has lost around half of its value in last five months while Peloton trades at around a third of its peak price. Fresh fears over the virus has breathed life into the two stocks, at least for now.
Markets have anyway been nervous as the virus made a comeback in Europe and some states in the U.S. also reported an uptick in cases. Last week, Austria and Slovakia went into a lockdown, while Germany, Europe’s largest economy, is mulling one. It reported some 75,000 new Covid cases on Thursday, a new daily record.