Hi @Tooks23da6P, I have no idea when we can easily travel abroad again, but the opportunity is probably to invest in companies that will survive and indeed thrive in the future once things do return to some semblance of normality, however long that takes, but to invest in them when they are beaten down, not when they have already bounced back. I was listening to Gaurav Sodhi on last Monday's "The Call" on Ausbiz talk about Sydney Airport - see here (from the 8:40 mark) and it was the first company that his team at Intelligent Investor bought in March 2020 during the depths of the Covid-crash, but he wouldn't be buying them now, in fact they were recently selling. While he thinks Sydney Airport is still going to be around and profitable in the future, he also thinks that Airports won't be taking on those sort of debt levels in the future, because banks won't let them go into that much debt for one thing. If Covid has taught us anything, it has taught us about risk, and that even monopoly assets like Sydney Airport can be REALLY seriously impacted by something that comes out of nowhere (or left field if you prefer). We always knew that airlines could be risky, but airports, particularly monopoly airports (ones that do not have ANY competition in that city) were previously regarded as fairly risk-free assets. Not so, it turns out. That is just one example. What Gaurav was saying was the GFC was a great teacher, and one of the main lessons it taught him was that when everything is being absolutely smashed, it's not the time for fundamental research. You need to have your shopping list ready to go, and when good companies get driven almost into the ground, from a share price perspective, you're ready to buy. You've already done the work. You know the quality. You know they'll survive. It's just a matter of getting them cheap enough when the opportunity presents. That learning would apply equally if we get another serious downturn because of India, Japan, new strains that are vaccine-resistant, or any other issues that crop up.
On working from home. Marcus Padley said in his Saturday email today:
I was on the ABC last week declaring that COVID was over and how everyone needs to get over their preciousness and get back to work not hang about in their slippers at home, taking four day weekends and pretending its work when its really just a COVID inspired softness that needs to harden up. I hear some employers are getting their staff back to normal by declaring that COVID working practices will end in 4 weeks with a "hard" return to work expected. The four weeks is to allow people to reverse engineer their home-working practices. From my point of view working at home, after some consideration, whilst it was great whilst it was a novelty, doesn't really work for me (being constantly disturbed) or the family (keep quiet or Dad will get shitty). So happy to get back to the office and the MT Team is equally relieved to get back to normal. On top of that I really don't like Zoom, I think its a terrible substitute for work place interaction.
This was me on the ABC this week.
Got a few emails about the "End of COVID" comment from ABC watchers. Some people seem to have a lot of time on their hands, too much time on their hands.
A decade or more ago I had one ABC producer telling me she had to reply to every email about her programs and it was a balls aching process. She pleaded with me some weeks not to say anything controversial or she would have to spend her weekend reading and replying to other people’s idle complaints. As Jon Faine always said, the ABC is the Australian Government’s complaints centre. At the time the ABC had one rule about replies, if the email had a swear word in it, you didn't have to reply. My producer friend would read these emails praying for a swear word to pop up so she could delete it.
So think before you complain. There is a human at the end of it trying to have a nice weekend without absorbing your inconsequential mental meanderings.
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Not short of an opinion our Marcus. However, he does make a point that working from home does not work well for everybody. And while there could be a fundamental shift towards remote location working, or other flexible work practices, in SOME industries or sectors, this is not going to be the death of the office. Whether some companies are going to "downsize" offices or take other measures that has an effect on office vacancies and prices, will be interesting to see, but it's going to take time to play out I think. I think the "home office" theme has already played out though, I don't think Harvey Norman (HVN), JB Hi-Fi (JBH) and Officeworks (owned by WES) are going to benefit too much more from people buying gear to enable them to work from home. I think that theme has been and gone now. There are also questions over the buy-from-home and home-delivery themes relating to whether those companies who greatly benefitted from that shift in 2020 are going to benefit AS much in 2021 and 2022. As in, are people going to return to face-to-face shopping again, or stick with internet shopping in the future? As always, it's not going to be one or the other but a mix of both. It's the nature of the mix that is the question, which is unknowable of course, like most future-related things are. We can make educated guesses, but they are still guesses. I would guess that those who felt that they had positive experiences with online ordering will continue to do it when it makes sense to, as many of us are time-poor these days, and being able to shop online at any time of the day or night is a positive for most people, and frees up time (when they would have been shopping face-to-face in a store, and travelling to and from the store) to do other things. That's how I feel about it anyway. But working from home - I'd love to do that, but it's unfortunately not possible in my line of work - a machine operator and production worker in a factory. Perhaps it's time for a career change...