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(Bloomberg) – Crowds of daytime traders embrace oral antiviral therapy from heavyweight Merck & Co., and move away from stocks of Covid vaccines, as investors assess prospects for treatments to combat and prevent coronavirus.
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Individuals bought $ 288 million from Kenilworth, New Jersey-based Merck, pushing stocks to an eight-month high, according to data from Vanda Research. Some retail traders funded these purchases by selling vaccine stocks, including Moderna Inc., BioNTech SE and Pfizer Inc., said the company that tracks retail trade flows in the United States.
Vaccine stocks have been hammered by retail and institutional investors since Merck said on Friday that a study showed its pill reduced the risk of becoming seriously ill or dying from Covid. A group of vaccine makers have lost a combined $ 33.5 billion in the past three sessions. Biotech stocks as a whole have also been caught in the recent risk-free trading that has wiped out billions of value from tech stocks and the market as a whole.
“Given the performance gap between vaccine manufacturers and Merck, we expect them to continue to continue this emerging trend,” said Ben Onatibia and Giacomo Pierantoni de Vanda. At the same time, there is an “overwhelming presence of vaccine manufacturers and value / reopening businesses” among the stocks that individuals sell.
More generally, retail investors are benefiting from the weakness of the broader markets, despite recent volatility. They’ve averaged $ 1.2 billion in assets per day this week, more than the average this year, with a preference for buying stocks in larger amounts when markets fall more than 1%, data shows. by Vanda.
US futures collapsed on Wednesday morning, with the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq both falling more than 1%. The S&P 500 fell 4.2% over the past month, while the highly technical Nasdaq fell 6.3%.
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