*This blog post is my personal opinion only and contains affiliate/referral links.

2020 is an unforgetable year on the Stock Market. It’s a year when we see a crash and a recovery happening months apart, and continuing to 2021 we have all time highs on the major indexes in the world. I am writing this blog post as a way to gauge what factors contribute to an investor’s success had they ride the “bounce” at any point on their investing last year.

First, let us acknowledge that when the market tanked on March 2020, the pessimism on the stocks is way deeper than anyone prepared for. We have a virus that is rapidly decimating lives and we were still learning how to fight it, in the meantime we watched people lose jobs, unable to pay rent and scrambled for government assistance.

If you don’t have the ways and the means to pay for your food, housing and other basic needs, then you most likely have no money to invest on those trying times. There’s a high chance that for those in need of ready cash, they may have tapped in on their investment too, that is they sell their stocks and investments so they can survive the pandemic.

For those who have the $$$ to invest, it will come as no surprise that they know they have the opportunity to capitalize when the economy is down and the stocks are on big discount. Take for example the ascent of the S&P 500 from 2300 points down last March to 3900 up at current level which is almost 1 year now. This rebound is proof that had you invested on the S&P 500 anytime last year, you would have benefited from the bull run of the Stock Market. The same can be said on NASDAQ and on Dow Jones Industrial which has their respective bull runs as well.

The argument for intelligent investing can be made if you targeted individual companies and invested on the strenght of their fundamental valuations. Looking back, some companies even with positive cash flow cannot sustain the onslaught of the covid lockdown and restrictions. We can thematically talk about bankruptcies here: retail like J Crew, airline like AeroMexico, health and fitness like 24 Hour Fitness and other sectors are especially hit because of the pandemic. And let’s not dismiss the Oil and Energy and Real Estate indurstries which is still recovering from early pandemic times.

On hindsight, the shift towards “remote” needs investing would have been the ideal stock targets because the majority of people are placed to work online and also to do other remote things like shop online. Think of workspace solution like Zoom, entertainment like Netflix, shopping like Amazon, and others.This will probably be sustainable post covid as we continue to be mostly geared to this remote lifestyle.

We basically have two tales of those who are brave enough to invest and found success during the pandemic: those who trusted and invested solely on the indexes and those that played into the “need at the moment” single stocks OR possibly both. On these cases, one may conclude that these investors got lucky because they trust their guts and research and then invest. For afterall, history repeats itself crash after crash and then the road to recovery.