8 tech stocks trading at an all-time high during the pandemic

The coronavirus pandemic has left a serious dent in the stock market, but not all industries have been hit hard. In fact, three of the eleven different industries represented in the S&P 500 index have already recovered: information technology, consumer staples, and health care.

MIT alum Calvin French-Owen illustrated this perfectly by comparing stock data from the beginning of the plunge in February and now, and grouping it by industry:

Grouping the stocks by industry, we start seeing some of the data stick out… pic.twitter.com/fn1DjDEe90

— Calvin French-Owen (@calvinfo) April 27, 2020

Most notably, as he shows, the information technology industry is now up around 8.5% compared to the start of the plunge in February.

So now that we know that the tech industry as a whole has been the most stable part of the economy, we can also look at which specific tech companies coped best. In fact, we were curious which tech companies are trading at or around an all-time high at the moment.

We screened tech stock data and – perhaps unsurprisingly — found a common theme: The cloud. From working from home productivity tools to cloud infrastructure, these are the stocks that are more expensive than they’ve ever been before.

Semiconductors: NVIDIA, AMD

NVIDIA, AMD, and Marvell Technology Group are some of the key global players in the production of chips used for cloud infrastructure. In the working from home economy we’ve been forced into, their necessity is magnified further. Among other uses, their chips enable cloud services that require high and quick throughput, such as online gaming and video-on-demand streaming services.

Communication infrastructure: Crown Castle, SBA Communications

From tens of thousands of cell towers to tens of thousands of miles of fiber networks, these are the juggernauts on the American continent when it comes to infrastructure needed to power both wired and wireless internet.

Online productivity: Atlassian, Veeva Systems, DocuSign, Citrix

Working from home doesn’t only require technical infrastructure, it also needs user-centric applications running on it that enable intuitive collaboration. Atlassian is well-known for its Jira issue-tracking application, Veeva is a market leader when it comes to pharmaceutical and life sciences applications, and DocuSign is leading in the electronic signatures division. Finally, Citrix is leading in what’s called virtualisation: Allowing for remote access to company applications and computers.