MRNA - Monthly Newsletter - May 2024

2024-06-05 05:10:00 ET

Summary

• High vacancies, increasing taxes and utilities and heavy debt loads are causing some property owners to simply walk away from significant buildings.
• Pfizer rose to $61 in December 2020 shortly after its vaccine came to market; it now looks decidedly ill at $29.
• We continue to look for high quality companies that make money in good times and bad, in sickness and in health, and over long periods.

By David Baskin

Lesson from the pandemic - Markets are complex

It is now just over 4 years since we all learned about COVID-19, and our lives were forever disrupted. Although most of us are no longer wearing masks in public, and the fear of air travel has disappeared (record travel in the US for Memorial Day last week), some changes look to be more permanent. Among these are the persistence of the "work from home" model, where many employees come to the office a few days a week, and some no days at all. This has, not surprisingly, caused havoc in the commercial real estate business, particularly in large city downtowns. A good and easy way of measuring how busy things are in city cores is to look at cellphone usage. That gives you a very good measure of how many people are there. The data is not reassuring....

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