It has been over a year since COVID caused business disruptions. Some companies saw business jump as their products and/or services helped people or other businesses cope with the pandemic. Quarterly earnings reports for these companies will have difficult comparisons for the year-ago "jump" quarters. These difficult comparisons may continue for a few more quarters.
Other companies saw business rapidly sink with the onset of COVID restrictions. As business gets back to normal these companies will report very favorable quarterly comparisons to the COVID quarters.
These COVID distortions should be included in your stock analysis. Fortunately, there are some tips available for coping with such disruptions and accounting for them in your stock analysis.
ICLUBcentral's own, Doug Gerlach, gave a presentation as part of the regular Investment Club Operations webinar on
"Coping With Volatile Markets". This webinar was presented on March 17, 2020 and a recording is available on the ICLUBcentral webinar archives at this URL:
https://www.iclub.com/webinars/webinar_iclub.asp#ArchivesOnce on the archives page, find the 2020-03-17 date and click on the title link. This will take you to the recording on the ICLUBcentral YouTube channel.
For those who are also BetterInvesting members, BI had a special webinar presented 6/23/2020 entitled
"Stock Selection Guidelines for Unusual Times". A recording of this presentation is available in the Video Learning section of the BI website at this URL:
https://www.betterinvest...ng-library/video-library . Once on the Video Learning page, scroll down to find this recording. The recordings are sorted by date as the default. You do need to be a BI member to access the recording.
I hope the resources mentioned above help you find a method to take the unusual circumstances of the last 18 months into account in your analysis. If you know of other resources concerning this issue, please share with the StockCentral community.
Russell Malley