Dod101 wrote:is up more than 10% today presumably because the market expects Biden to reduce the import duty that Trump imposed. I have not seen it at over £30 for quite some time. Have I missed some news?
It's the news about the success of Pfizer coronavirus vaccine in phase 3 trials, with a very large sample, which is highly significant. Back in July the British Government had preordered some 30 million doses of this vaccine, but the Oxford vaccine was getting all the publicity so this went under many people's radar.
I arrived home just after midday from a walk and saw that a lot of my shares had jumped by over 5% whilst I was out. A move like that means that some serious news has hit the market and sure enough when I turned on the TV it was wall-to-wall vaccine coverage.
This was shortly followed by my texting almost everyone in my mobile phone contacts book to pass on the news.
My biologist friend, who's more of a glass half-empty person, says that it is "excellent news", "very positive" but "not a total magic bullet". The key point is that the success in producing a vaccine like this it shows that the virus can now be brought under control, after allowing for the time and logistics needed to deploy it. We won't be back to normal by Christmas, more like March/April in the best case scenario. As we know, stockmarkets are a great mechanism for incorporating new news into prices - today is a great example of this.
"Few scientists would have expected a first-wave COVID vaccine to be 90% effective. Many had said that a jab that prevented just 50% of cases would be a gamechanger."https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-race-for-a-vaccine-is-in-the-closing-stages-and-we-now-have-a-thoroughbred-12128519Diageo up 12.5% as I type this. Wetherspoons is up by 20.7% (it is much more significant news for pubs)