Amid Corona-Cratered Markets, Use FIW To Look for Opportunities

WE’RE ALL HUNKERED DOWN in one way or another, imagining the ways our life may be changed and wondering when—and if—things will reset.

- By Steven Gee, Marc Katchay, and Pranav Thakkar

In addition to the tragic human cost, the slowdown has been devastating to most businesses. The market damage has been immense. Especially hard-hit: the travel and leisure sector.

If you live in the New York City area, you may have taken your kids for a quick thrill-filled summer afternoon at the Six Flags Great Adventure park in New Jersey. Now, of course, with Covid-19 shutting down crowd-gathering venues, that park remains closed at least until mid-May. Shares of the operator of the park—Six Flags Entertainment Corp. in Grand Prairie, Texas—have plunged because of the uncertainty about the full economic impact of the pandemic.

Let’s say you wanted to dig into debt issued by companies in the leisure sector to see whether you can identify any opportunities amid the dislocations there. Here’s how you can use the Fixed Income Worksheet (FIW) and some other Bloomberg tools to do that. (This article continues a series on using FIW that began with “Using the Fixed Income Worksheet in Your Analysis: An Introduction.”)

1. Your holistic credit analysis may start with a look at equity markets. To chart Six Flags’ performance since last year, run {SIX US GP }. If you’re planning to share some of the relevant information and add your observations, consider using the annotation tools. Here you can add a text annotation to highlight SIX’s drastic price plunge, the almost $50 drop from last August (FIG. 1).