The tech winners and losers of the pandemic

days of covid-19, the tech industry was consumed by a sense of euphoria. With billions of people locked down at home, work and play were shifting online. Many hoped that the new normal would spark a huge as firms digitised and workers spent less time . The excitement was most evident in stockmarkets, where any firm related to this trend saw its share price surge. The value of an equally weighted portfolio of five pandemic darlings—call it the “lockdown lunacy index”—increased by 320% from the start of the pandemic to its peak in August 2021. The tech-heavy , by contrast, rose by 88%. The mania has ended. Today the lockdown lunacy index—which includes Netflix, a streaming service; Peloton, a maker of fancy exercise bikes; Robinhood, a stock-trading app; Shopify, an e-commerce platform; and Zoom, a videoconferencing firm—has fallen by more than 80% from its peak, far exceeding the 18% drop in the . Zoom and friends are trading at below pre-pandemic prices.