Is Air Travel Coming Back Soon?

Its been 1.5 years since COVID-19 struck us. Air travel had completely come to a halt when many countries announced border closures. Airports were left empty and airlines had to cut flights and retrenched staff as a result. 

However, things seem to changed recently with higher rates of people being vaccinated. In the US, their government have started to relax measures and air travel is definitely back in the United States. Their airports are full again and flights are also full.

This is a stark contract from last year where airports are empty and flights were relatively empty too. Studies have shown that higher vaccination rates reduces COVID-19 infection rates significantly as seen in the chart below.

Minister Lawrence Wong has also said that "With a higher vaccination rate, compliance with social distancing and safe management measures, regular testing, and faster and more comprehensive contact tracing, Singapore will ease restrictions and gradually restore "our normal lives, both within Singapore and at our borders", said Mr Wong, who is co-chair of the multi-ministry task force tackling Covid-19. Mr Wong said: "As we progress through these stages (of reopening), we will ease our restrictions and gradually restore our normal lives, both within Singapore and at our borders. Then we will move to phase three, and even beyond phase three, to a new normal phase of living with endemic Covid."" This was reported in the Straits Times article here. We have a chance of going into endemic mode once we achieve vaccination rates of above 75% in October, which is the target set by the government. 

Shares of US airlines such as Delta Airlines and United Airlines have went up steadily in the past 1 year. It may still have some run up over the next 1 year as air travel progressively resumes. 

Here's a video on the situation of US airports and its airlines where we can see clearly how packed and crowded it is currently:

Elsewhere in Singapore and Asia, it doesn't seem that air travel is resuming soon as COVID-19 infection rates is still high in countries such as Malaysia. But, as vaccination rates pick up, more air travel bubbles will be formed in the next few months and we will see some form of air travel and tourism back in action. 

As an investor, it may probably be a good time to accumulate some travel related stocks such as Hospitality REITs. Their prices are still depressed and those who are early in the game may be able to reap some rewards in the future. We shall see how situation develops from here on. 

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Identifying Buying Opportunities In The Stock Market Using Investor One Portal

Many investors will find it difficult to research on stocks as we often have to go to different websites just to get the required information. For myself, I often have to manually go to the company's investor relation page and search for information such as financials and key ratios to make the right decision for my investment. 

With Singapore going back to phase 2 of the circuit breaker again with more COVID-19 restrictions, some stocks have went down which present buying opportunities again. Recently, I was introduced to a content portal by ShareInvestor called Investor One. This is something like a one stop platform for all our investment needs. To be honest after I found this platform, I would personally use it to find all the investment information I need because its easy to use and really has all the considerations on the information which an investor would want access to. 

The Investor One main page is simple and easily accessible. As you can see from the top bar, there are 5 different tabs: Editorial, Performance, Quick Facts, Social and IPOs.

These are information which are useful for investors to find stock buying opportunities or find out more about the stocks they want to invest in. 

Let me dive briefly into what each section has which I found to be useful. 

Firstly, under Editorial, it has this academy page which new investors would be able to read up on how to value stocks. From its front page, you can already see 3 solid articles on how to evaluate a REIT, common characteristics of quality growth stocks and how to understand business models.  

Secondly, they also have bloggers insights and C-suite interviews with CEOs of listed entities. These interviews are useful to know more about who the management are and the direction of the company moving forward. Hearing from the management is often important for investing as the wrong management team can often lead a company to destruction. 

Thirdly, also under editorial, there is a company insights page where we can find information on companies to invest in. 

When we run out of stocks to invest in, sometimes we will use a screener to find stocks. Investor One has a performance page where we can screen for the top 5 stocks in various categories such as lowest price to earnings ratio, highest dividend yield, highest discount to book and highest revenue/earnings growth. These are all good metrics to screen a stock for. 

I especially like the quick facts page where I am able to key in a stock name which I want to find information on and it will display most of the information I need to evaluate a stock for investment. 

For example, when I key in Lendlease REIT, here's what the page displayed:

In one look, I'm able to see its chart, and key ratios such as price to book and dividend yield which is what I look for when investing in REITs. With dining-in restrictions in place, shopping mall REITs prices have dropped from a high and are becoming attractive again. Lendlease has a price to book of 0.88. At the price of 0.74, it is at a discount to its book value. However, yield looks low due to the rebates given to tenants during this COVID-19 situation to help them. Yields should gradually increase as COVID-19 situation becomes better but it may take awhile as we see some swings in the market for the next few years. As Lendlease is still a relatively new REIT listed only in Oct 2019, it does not have the growth figures. 

Let's look at another company, Micro-Mechanics, which is benefiting from the demand on technology growth as they are in the semiconductor industry. 

As we can see from above, the growth figures of Micro-Mechanics can be seen now as this stock has been listed for quite some time now. We are able to see its revenue and profit growth in one glance. We can even see other ratios of this company where you will find that it is quite fairly valued.

If you think that's all for the quick facts page, you would be surprised that there are more information such as other key ratios like return on assets or equity, total shareholder returns, links to annual reports where you can easily read up more on the company, latest news and and even a link to its investor relations (IR) page where we can easily retrieve financial reports and presentations on the stock we are looking for.

You can try out the quick facts page and find more companies you are interested in. 

Perhaps, the most interesting thing is its collaboration with Investing Note where we can see what other investors like us are saying about the stocks we are looking at. Investing Note is like the Facebook of the investing world where investment ideas are discussed actively by thousands of investors on this social media platform. They even dedicated a social page to consolidate all the buzz in the Investing Note social media platform. 

All in all, Investor One is a good portal which I will use moving forward. It lets me easily find stocks information which I do not have to search on multiple sites anymore. You may check out Investor One page here which is free to use and no subscription needed. 

You can also check out the Telegram page below:

This post is sponsored by ShareInvestor but all views are of my own