Airlines and cruises take a hit, Zoom and vaccine stocks up

Yahoo Finance's Ines Ferre looks at how markets and travel sectors plunged on Friday amid concerns of a new COVID-19 variants while certain work-from-home and vaccine companies are rising.

Video transcript

JARED BLIKRE: And we are in the midst of a market sell-off right now. The Dow at session lows, you can see it off 930 points right now, the S&P 500 down more than 1 and 3/4 of a percent, and the NASDAQ is the least dirty shirt in the laundry basket. That is off about 1 and 1/3 percent, but we want to get more in the markets right now. We have Yahoo Finance's Ines Ferre with all the latest. Ines, I'm seeing health care as the only sector in the green, but everything else just getting smashed.

INES FERRE: Yeah, that's right, with energy and financials leading to the downside. You mentioned the major averages Jared, but I also want to point out the Russell 2000, down 3 percent right now. And this morning over the phone I spoke with market strategist at DriveWealth, Jay Woods basically saying, look the market breadth had been horrible going into this sell off today.

Russell 2000, in November, broke out of that range that it had been trading in between February and October, and it failed to hold that range. And so he's saying that that's certainly something that's concerning. Also, taking note that it is a shortened trading day today, so there are less hands on deck, and there is less volume.

Take a look at the sector action as we were just mentioning, all the sectors being in the red except for health care. I want to mention the travel stocks, because these are getting hammered over concerns of that variant in South Africa, if there were to be new lockdowns, you can see. 52 week lows for several of these, including JetBlue, Delta, Carnival, Norwegian.

Also taking a look at the stay at home trades, those are the ones that are gaining today. Some of the work from home stocks that had gotten hammered recently, but today they're seeing some gains. You're looking at a Zoom that's up 7%. We're also watching Peloton up more than 3%, year to date though Peloton is still down 69%. But also Teladoc is also one of the gainers in that work from home trade.

And then finally, I also want to mention pharmaceuticals. Health care as you were mentioning the only sector in the green. Pfizer today, reaching new highs up 7% as these health care companies are seeing gains over concerns of that variant in South Africa.

JARED BLIKRE: Yeah thank you for that. Yahoo finances Ines Ferre.