The Covid-19 pandemic has been particularly brutal to many sectors, none more so than the retail sector. Having said this some retailers have done well and proved resilience due to the ‘essential’ element of their product offering, with the supermarkets seeing everyday pre lockdown a Christmas trading day and empty shelves became the norm at Tesco (LON:TSCO), J Sainsbury (LON:SBRY) and Wm Morrison Supermarkets (LON:MRW), having said this, bar the initial excitement of the increased buying, their stock price has reverted back flat but resilient on year, probably down to the restrictions and increased cost of sales post lockdown and which may continue to be seen for a long period yet. The purely online retailers are once again in a crisis is the best position to be, still on the food retail theme the share price of Ocado (LON:OCDO) has gone up over 100% in the past two months, valuing the company at a mouth-watering £14.65billion, not one I would touch on its financial numbers.
Most retailers are shut on the bricks but still live on the clicks element of the business albeit at a slower rates due to extra measures in the process to protect the employees. One clothing company seeing good support by its loyal customer base in terms of an uplift in online sales and support by its financial backers to see it through is Joules (LON:JOUL) Being an essential supplier, Wynnstay (LON:WYN) the manufacturer and supplier of agricultural products and a StockRank 100 company has remained very robust and those who spotted this would have bagged a real bargain at 200p in early April.
Halfords (LON:HFD) hit 51p in March and is now sitting on 166p, again a quality company who have benefited from the essential retail category to remain open due to the car servicing side and what has been an absolute flyer for them has been the bikes, with many buying for the one a day exercise on lovely quiet roads, or as it is now as many exercise sessions you want per day and on much busier roads!
Another company in the bicycle space what has rallied well over a 100% since the March lows is Tandem (LON:TND), a company scoring 8 out of 9 on the…
