Out of Favor

Amazon.com got a much-needed 1.9% bounce today, to $86.77, after dipping as low as $84.33 in yesterday's trading. That put the shares in sneezing distance of their split-adjusted March 2020 low of $83.83. That was during the worst market crash in years, prompted by the spread of Covid-19 and the shutdown of the global economy.

It spurred a massive shift to entertaining, working, and shopping from home, benefiting firms like Amazon. But the one-time pandemic winner has become a post-pandemic loser in 2022, as e-commerce investments mount and cloud-computing growth decelerates. Amazon stock is down more than 50% from its July 2021 record high. It's trading around the same levels it first hit in early 2019.

Walt Disney was another Covid-19-era success story with its streaming business making up for the shutdown of its theme parks. Disney+ garnered millions of subscribers worldwide every quarter in 2020 and 2021, as locked-down consumers turned to the service for entertainment.

Since then, investors have shifted their focus to streaming profits from subscriber growth and the theme-park recovery has been short of lofty expectations.

Disney stock is down about 57% from its 2021 record high and fell below its 2020 low earlier this week.

Disney is among the 44 S&P 500 companies that have seen their stock prices drop below their 2020 trough this year. Amazon is just a bad trading day away from joining them.

Many of the other members of the unenviable club are also in the technology and media industries. 

"Other tech companies such as Meta Platforms, Intel, and Match Group are trading below their 2020 closing lows," Barron's Teresa Rivas wrote today. So is Netflix.

Read more from Teresa here.