Index – Economy – What were the good investments this year?

Shining gold

What can we invest in times of pandemic, crisis, restrictive measures and general uncertainty? The answer would have been very simple a few years ago: gold! When there is a lot of uncertainty, investors tend to flee the markets and choose the investment that seems the safest. So far, for example, it has been gold. This year, however, the situation has been complicated. In fact, he didn’t necessarily have to flee from the stock exchanges!

Which, let’s face it, looks like a fantastic investment and meets expectations as it was a crisis so we could expect the price of gold to go up.

And the stock market?

If someone did nothing more than follow the US S&P 500 stock index,

This index averaged 7.19 percent in recent years, but this year, as we know, was not an average year in stock terms either. Therefore, if someone only invested in the leading US stock index, which can be considered conservative, they would already be well above inflation and could earn more than investors in gold. By the way, the price of gold rose 25.04 percent in 2009, during the last major financial crisis, which is almost as much as this year.

But what happened when someone bought a stock with good performance? Working on the development of a vaccine against Covid-19

So this is a good investment, to put it mildly. In January, of course, we did not know there was going to be an epidemic, and not many investors had heard of Modern at the time, even though the company was not new as it had been working on developing treatments based In nucleic acids for at least a decade. So we could say that it took (would have been) luck for someone to buy out Moderna’s stock in January.

Modern vs. Pfizer

Yes, but on March 16, for example, when the first patient was vaccinated with his already completed Modern Covid vaccine, the company’s papers were still worth only $ 26. So here it was already possible to know that there is an epidemic and there is a company biotechnology firm that developed a vaccine against the pathogen in record time. Even then it could have been a logical investment.

Another vaccine development company, Pfizer, even surpassed Moderna. Vaccination with Pfizer has been approved for the first time in the Western world for widespread use, specifically in Great Britain. So would it be a good investment too, maybe even better than Moderna stock? The answer is surprising: a Pfizer paper was priced at $ 37.13 on January 1 and is now at $ 37.38. So it doesn’t matter which vaccine manufacturer we have invested in. The explanation is that while Moderna’s value is primarily determined by the success of its Covid vaccination, in the case of Pfizer, it represents a relatively small percentage of the company’s overall results.

But let’s take another company that practically everyone has heard of!

This increase made Elon Musk the second-richest man in the world this year, he was still in the middle of Forbes’s billionaires list earlier this year, and is now second only to Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s first man. Tesla shares have been viewed by many as a risky investment until now, but this is not true or is only partially true. The price of paper was fairly stable last year, fluctuating only a small percentage in 2019 before this year’s price explosion.

For someone who really wanted to be sure, buying Apple stock was enough. The company’s stocks have also performed fantastic returns this year, as they have in recent years, It rose above 60 percent its value. From the technology sector, Amazon, PayPal and AMD also performed well this year, showing growth roughly similar to Apple’s.

Bitcoin broke the ceiling

We also can’t stop saying bitcoin’s performance this year:

The trends are also worth watching: the price of the cryptocurrency fell at the beginning of the year, on March 16, so it was only $ 5,024 at the beginning of the pandemic. From here, it worked its way up to today’s exchange rate, which may also indicate that it became an escape strategy, similar to gold, or even more so, as its price rise far exceeded that of gold. precious metal.

And the property?

The general truth is perhaps that in a crisis, it is worth investing in real estate. This was also the case during the events of 2008, when there was a huge drop in prices in most of the world’s real estate market. Anyone who invests in real estate can rightly expect a good return. It depends on many things, of course, in large part on the location.

In 2008, for example, real estate was available at incredible prices in Las Vegas or in some cities in Florida, so some companies were also advertising in Hungary, offering complete management (it is relatively easy to buy a property in the United States as a foreigner). Similar trends can also be observed this year, but to a much lesser extent than in 2008.

Real estate is expensive, and only those with big savings can invest in it, let’s say more. This is quite true, but there are a growing number of services like DiversyFund that allow us to co-own commercial real estate, such as office buildings, for a relatively small amount, say $ 500, from which we can also benefit.

(Cover Image: Spencer Platt / Getty Images Hungary)