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Comment by zpeti | Hacker News Reader

Seems like a good time to buy shares in whoever manufactures industrial sized extra cold freezers.

Seems like a good time to own shares in literally anything. The DJI is going to open up 1,500 points at least.

Seems like yesterday was a good time to buy shares. Now it's not so clear!

I initially thought so too, but there are some big losers in the market today - think home delivery (Ocado) , entertainment (Netflix), and more interestingly specialist Covid test suppliers.

Except ZM

Good time to buy shares in almost anything that's not related to online meetings or home deliveries, to be honest. Stock markets are skyrocketing.

I saw some claims on Twitter that zoom took a hit, though there’s enough random noise in the market that I never know what to believe

Zoom took a hit partly because of this, and partly because of an FTC settlement that is requiring them to beef up their security and open themselves up to security audits, as a result of them basically lying about how their encryption worked.

So which company benefits the most here? From a cursory googling the following seem decent:

- The Whirlpool Corporation - Electrolux AB - LG Electronics Inc.

problem is these companies have a lot of exposure to other sectors as well of course.

Thermo Fisher Scientific has freezers that hit these temps. About $10-20k per unit it appears.

https://www.fishersci.com/us/en/browse/90106033/ultra-low-te...

Yes, I've been in biotechs that had 100s of these freezers in a room.

Pfizer mentioned them already in May and their stock has already seen an increase of more than 50%...

TMO was down 8% yesterday, the perspective of less testing seems to more than offset the positive impact of the news.

https://www.skycell.ch/

That company couldn't be more irrelevant to the discussion. They specialize in keeping airplane food at between +2c to +8c on the tarmac in places like Dubai.

Probably the airlines who will both be dealing with the logistics and be able to return to BAU quicker because of the vaccine. For example, American Airlines is up 25% premarket today and IAG (owner of British Airways) is up nearly 30%.

Based on this NYT article [1], some logistics companies planning to store and transport the vaccine are using freezers from Stirling Ultracold. It may just be a curiosity, but their freezers (as the name would suggest) use bona fide Stirling engines rather than the typical two-stage compressors used in most ULT freezers.

As someone in life science research who uses plenty of -80 freezers, I've always been curious about Stirling Ultracold. Maybe they're on to something after all.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/18/business/coronavirus-covi...

Nit: Stirling cryocoolers, not Stirling engines. Thermodynamically, it's just reversed. You're driving mechanical/electrical power in to get a thermal difference, not dissipating a thermal difference to get mechanical work/electrical power out.

gas-liquide cycle freezers typically do not have enough of a temperature gradiants to work. Normal freon (R-whatever you have heard of) don't get cold enough. That isn't to say you can't make one, but stirling cycle is not much worse so just use it.

Get some Peloton too. People will probably want to start exercising in their homes.

You’re way too late to the party. Peloton became a $30 billion company during covid. Down over 10% in premarket trading

>You’re way too late to the party. Peloton became a $30 billion company during covid. Down over 10% in premarket trading

He's mocking people who are making obvious short sighted covid-based stock plays.

Or maybe he didn't understand the reference to industrial sized extra cold freezers?

I thought it might be sarcastic but saw he had been downvoted, so couldn’t tell. Guess I need to sharpen my sarcasm skills

Yep, time to invest in zoom too. I assume at some stage people will need to make more video calls.

Just make sure it's the right one! https://securityboulevard.com/2020/04/investors-buy-up-the-w...

How? That's like trying to go to a luxury hotel and ending up in the parking lot of a landscaping company.

I think Nintendo will do pretty good as well, Animal Crossing looks like an ideal game for a lockdown.

Today is the day that "lockdown" stocks will go down.

Zoom -15%, Nasdaq flat, Norwegian Cruise Line +28%

How are shares in comedic irony doing?

Dry ice manufacturers may be a better bet. Hard to change -70C/-80C freezer manufacturing capacity, but pretty easy to pump out more dry ice or LN2 for storage.

Time to invest my life's savings in bandaids

Since you mention it ... it's kind of hard to buy anything. I couldn't log in to my Schwab account this morning [1], and others are reporting problems with TD Ameritrade/Scottrade as well, and it seems to be affecting other brokerages, due to this high trading volume/volatility.

[1] https://downdetector.com/status/charles-schwab/

Maybe also manufacturers of liquid nitrogen dewars.

this is the only investment I find possibly useful. Liquid nitrogen is so common in industry that I don't think there will be a problem sourcing enough just from spare capacity.

The places that would need to worry about building cold chain infrastructure capacity probably won't have the cash for permanent installations on top of the money they'll need to buy the vaccine.

Better to invest in companies that make and lease refrigerated semi-trailers, I'd think.

Not really. Pfizer has bet big on this by preemptively manufacturing the vaccine. They're already filling freezers. Unless you're referring to the freezers some less equipped distribution centers/agencies will need you acquire?

A bit late; these companies already have vast stocks of the vaccine ready to be deployed once they get greenlit. They will be getting - and have already received - orders and reservations for tens, hundreds of millions of units of a potential vaccine, awaiting testing and approval; see https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8852159/The-video-w..., citing they're aiming to produce 1.3 billion doses next year.

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