Investors are gearing up for some fun times.
The PEJ entertainment and leisure ETF, which holds Disney, Airbnb and Live Nation, hit a record high on Thursday for the third day in a row. It has risen 32% in 2021, more than six times the gains for the S&P 500.
One of the high flyers has been AMC Entertainment, buoyed by interest from retail and Reddit investors. That stock has climbed 385% so far this year.
Danielle Shay, director of options at Simpler Trading, said it would be wise to wait on some of the names.
“I would caution investors. Don’t bite up at the highs. You can look at hot stocks within this overall ETF and try to find ones that are pulling back right now,” she told CNBC’s “Trading Nation” on Thursday.
One name Shay does recommend is Chipotle, up 10% so far this week but underperforming the S&P 500 overall in March.
“Chipotle has seen a really nice pullback. Chipotle has been strong throughout the pandemic which leads me to believe that once everything opens up again, it’s going to be even stronger after the fact,” Shay said.
Steve Chiavarone, portfolio manager at Federated Hermes, said federal fiscal policy should support consumer spending as the economy reopens.
“With all the stimulus that’s in the system, consumers are sitting on roughly $3 trillion in excess savings. They’ve got a pent-up demand that they’re going to deploy, so we expect to see folks take longer vacations, go on more trips, visit family that they didn’t get to see a year before, and really reallocate their budget to leisure and entertainment. Stocks in that area stand to benefit from that for quite a while more,” he said during the same segment.
To Chiavarone’s point, Shay says another stock, Airbnb, could benefit from consumers’ desire to travel.
“It is a growth stock, it’s a really popular stock, and maybe it doesn’t really make a lot of sense about where it’s trading, but the fact of the matter is that people are buying it, and people are using Airbnb. I do think that Airbnb … will continue to go higher in the near future,” Shay said.
Airbnb was one of the top performers in the PEJ ETF on Thursday, climbing nearly 8%. It trades with a 24 times price-to-sales ratio. The S&P 500, by comparison, trades at less than three times.
