Stocks Are Already Responding To Post-Covid Pent-Up Demand. What You Need to Know.

The narrative that Covid-19 vaccine inoculations will enable reopenings and a normalised economy has begun to play out. And while stocks have been down of late, the decline is actually a positive signal about the economy.

The hope has been that, as the roll-out of vaccines goes on, government restrictions will be lifted, and small businesses will rehire workers. The question mark, in addition to whether vaccinations will stop the pandemic, has been whether the economy will be healthy enough to bounce back.

After all, shops can only rehire if they have the cash, and consumers—many of whom are out of work—can only spend if they have money. Yet the trillions of dollars the government continues to spend to support the economy, including jobless benefits and direct stimulus checks, have provided a major boon for household cash savings.

The groundwork has been laid, it seems, for the demand the economy suddenly lost during the pandemic to come back just as fast.

At the same time, daily inoculations in America through January were many times higher than in December. The pace has remained brisk, with more than 65 million doses administered so far, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. States have indeed been reopening.

Economic data shows the improvement.

The unemployment rate is 6.3%, down from close to 15% at the depth of the pandemic and down 0.4 percentage point in January. Jobs are coming back, even if the labor-market recovery is uneven at times. Household incomes rose 10% in January from December.

As people grow more confident about their job prospects and safety, they are spending some of the cash they have accumulated. Retail sales rose more than 5% month over month in January. Companies are anticipating strong demand: Orders for durable goods rose more than 3% for January, more than triple the amount economists expected.

In short, reopenings are working for the economy and consumers are already unleashing pent-up demand. Economists expect gross domestic product to increase in the mid-single digits in percentage terms for 2021, a gain that would bring economic activity back to near the 2019 level. Economists at RBC Capital Markets wrote in a recent note that 9% growth for the year is conceivable.

On the surface, the stock market hasn’t seemed to reflect optimism. The S&P 500 is down more than 3% since Feb. 12. That is when interest rates begin their most recent pop higher, which makes the risk of owning stocks less attractive.

But growth stocks—a haven for investors during much of last year’s market turmoil—have been leading the decline. Those stocks are more sensitive to changes in rates and they are less influenced by economic growth than value stocks are.

The rising rates reflect changes that benefit value stocks: increasing expectations for inflation and better demand for goods and services. The Vanguard S&P 500 Value Index exchange-traded fund (VOOV) is flat since Feb. 12.

The strong economic trends are young. The most important factor now is how effective vaccines will be against new virus strains.

Gold is one of the market’s go-to hedges in rocky times. Don’t forget that gold miners’ stocks are too.

The stock market’s gains in 2026 belie the rocky macroeconomic picture: elevated inflation, heightened geopolitical tensions, and jitters about the artificial-intelligence trade. That backdrop, in theory, should be the time for gold to shine. Instead, the price of the yellow metal has tumbled more than 5% so far, after last year’s blistering 65% rally. In part, the U.S. dollar’s recovery has stymied gold, which benefited from the greenback’s weakness in 2025.

Even with the precious metal’s recent weakness, gold mining stocks could be the best way to profit from this year’s uncertainty.

Gold miners “are a valuable hedge against macro risks that would likely be damaging for equities,” BCA Research’s Noah Weisberger and Rishabh Shah wrote this week.

Concerns about the Federal Reserve’s next moves to tackle inflation, the increasingly crowded AI trade, and steep valuations for tech stocks are just some of the drivers that could help gold’s price get on even footing— and lead to even bigger gains for miner stocks.

These stocks’ prices tend to outpace gold’s moves, because the companies have fixed operational costs. So when gold’s price rallies, their profit margins soar, and vice versa. For instance, the VanEck Gold Miners GDX +7.39% exchange-traded fund has fallen 11% this year as the metal has slumped.

Now, gold’s price just needs to stabilize to help miners’ stocks take off, and that seems to be happening. The precious metal has recently found support above the $4,000 level, and has stuck in a narrow range since the end of June. But its price rose ever so slightly in July, ending a four-month losing streak for the metal. Technical analysis also suggests that gold is due for a comeback.

Barron’s recently wrote that the pullbacks for both gold miners and the metal itself are overdone. Senior technical analyst Doug Busch noted that the VanEck ETF is on the “verge of a breakout” and has the potential to hit $11o in early 2027, up more than 40% from its current price.

Gold miners also have more than their role as a market hedge going for them. Their fundamentals are solid, too, says Chris Mancini, portfolio co-manager of the Gabelli Gold Fund.

“Precious metals miners are generating substantial amounts of free cash flow given profit margins of over $2,000 per ounce, and are returning this cash to shareholders through buybacks and dividends,” he said in an email.

“Buying the miners is a cheap way to get exposure to the price of gold,” he added. His fund owns Newmont NEM +6.71%, a Barron’s stock pick last year, and Agnico Eagle Mines as top holdings, as well as miners Northern Star Resources, Endeavour Mining, and Kinross Gold K+8.59%.

Miners are better businesses than they used to be, the BCA team added.

“Capex is more disciplined, margins are high and rising…and they are largely independent of the AI story,” Weisberger, BCA’s head of equities, and Shah, a senior analyst, wrote.

That last part is key. AI is disrupting the software industry and many other services and information-oriented businesses, and investors have piled into AI stocks. But ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and other large-language models aren’t going to replace the need to mine for metals.

“Equity portfolios can benefit from exposure to quality that is uncorrelated to AI risk, and gold miners fit the bill,” the BCA team said.

They recommend that investors buy the VanEck Gold Miners ETF, which owns top miners such as Agnico, Barrick Mining ABX +7.24%, and Newmont.

An important bonus for big gold miners’ stocks is that their valuations are attractive after the gold’s pullback, too. The VanEck ETF is now trading at just a little more than nine times next year’s earnings estimates. That’s a big discount to its five-year average price-to-earnings ratio of 14, according to FactSet.

What’s more, the ETF is currently valued at a more than 50% discount to the S&P 500 SPX -0.17%, which is trading for about 19 times earnings estimates for 2027. Mining stocks have typically traded at just a 25% discount to the broader market over the past five years. So there is significant upside for the group if valuations move back toward normal levels.

One factor that complicates mining stocks as a market hedge, of course, is if stocks bounce back, which has been the case so far in August.

But both the market and economic outlooks remain cloudy, and investors remain nervous about the Fed’s next moves and AI stocks. Gold miners should do just fine, even if the anxious mood on Wall Street persists.

Stocks Are Already Responding To Post-Covid Pent-Up Demand. What You Need to Know.

The path to economic recovery is starting to clear.