Whatever happened to the pandemic darling stocks?

The COVID-19 pandemic propelled a variety of stocks to new heights, including companies that enabled work-from-home setups like Zoom (ZM) or Peloton (PTON).

Yahoo Finance's Jared Blikre observes how these "pandemic darlings" have held up since slowly coming out of the pandemic these past two years, highlighting the losses seen over that period despite significant year-to-date gains in 2023. Some of these stocks include Carvana (CVNA), Coinbase (COIN), and several other companies that have seen major turnarounds this past year.

For more expert insight and the latest market action, click here to watch this full episode of Yahoo Finance Live.

Video Transcript

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BRAD SMITH: As 2023 comes to a close, we know the narrative on AI, the Mag Seven, and the world's weirdest equity rally, but what about those stocks that we used to love that are facing some tricky times? What's going to happen to the 2023 laggards that were once pandemic darlings? Who better to tell us than Yahoo Finance's Jared Blikre. Hey, Jared.

JARED BLIKRE: Hey, Brad. Thank you for that. And let's think about those pandemic darlings-- Peloton, Zoom, Moderna, practically the poster child for the pandemic. I mean, they had the first vaccine. This is what we're looking at for some of those stocks this year.

And we can see some outperformance by Coinbase, up 404%, Moderna down 44%. So it's a game of have and have nots. But over the last two years it's just a game of have nots for the most part. Rocket up about 5%. But a lot of these stocks really just a shadow of what they once were.

You take a look at Carvana, that's up 1,000% this year. And this is year to date pretty impressive. But when you take a look over the last two years, it is a different story. It is still locked into the bottom end of its trading range over this period of time.

And when you take a look at the five-year, a lot of these charts simply look like the same. Before the pandemic, you have some activity down here. Then we got this giant mountain and steep fall off, and just trying to find their footing somewhere in the lower end of their range.

But they're not all like that. And, in fact, over the last two months, some of these stocks have come back pretty strong. Take a look at Coinbase, which is up 151% over the last two months. I'll show you the year to date, so you can get a different context here. This is absolutely incredible, but very much tied to Bitcoin. And since this stock is tied to different fundamentals and a lot of others, I think it has a decent chance of fully coming back.

Here's a look at the five-year, you can see it is in a much higher range than Carvana, for instance, that we were just looking at. But I don't feel that way about all of these stocks. And, in fact, let me just show you some of these are pretty close to their 52-week highs here and some are not.

And for that, I would say if you're a stock and you haven't been able to rally in the last two weeks, that's a problem for the market. Here's BuzzFeed, that's down 94% from its 52-week high and not its record high. Here's AMC, that's down 95% over the last five years. Here's over the last two years, you can see 97.8%.

That's basically 0 for 0 for somebody who bought at the top, except you're still in the game. So what are you going to do if you're holding on to some of these stocks and it's not looking promising for the new year? This is the last day of tax loss harvesting. You can still get a tax advantage on some of these stocks. And let me just show you some historical examples of why you might want to ditch some of these longer term losers.

Here is Intel. I'm going to show you a max chart. This is a turnaround story, and I happen to like the fundamentals right now. But you take a look at what happened during the dotcom boom and bust. This stock was dead money for decades here. And it's only recently come back. If you were holding that, you were simply sitting on money that was not being productively used.

Here's Cisco, very similar story-- dotcom boom, dotcom bust. It's still in the middle of its trading range right there after 2020 years. Micron, very similar story. This is another chip stock. It has come back really nicely. Let's take a look at the five-year. This is a stock you might have want to bought five years ago or a few years ago, but holding for 20 years was clearly a bad idea.

Now here's one of my favorite charts. Here's Citigroup. A max chart, look at this. Global financial crisis hit. And, in fact, this was a decade long high that it was maintaining. It is still down 90% from those levels. That's two decades later, 90% has not come back.

You want to take a look at another stock, Deutsche Bank, another financial stock got decimated during the financial crisis. Down 82%, but down more than 90% from these highs.

So take a look at your stock here. If it's looking like one of these that I was just showing you like Citigroup, probably going to take a while for it to come back, especially in this environment. But if you're taking a look at Carvana-- or excuse me, Coinbase here, maybe even Carvana, the fact that it's been able to reclaim some of this lost territory puts it in better footing for the new year, guys.

BRIAN SOZZI: Brutal chart on Citigroup, Jared. Appreciate it. Thanks so much.