With the benefit of hindsight, one can say that the stock market got wildly overexcited a year ago about the recovery prospects of consumer-facing companies. When the restrictions came off, went the thinking, punters would enjoy themselves and lockdown’s corporate losers would be transformed into winners.
As happens often, an essentially sound idea was overdone. Shares in Mitchells & Butlers, the UK’s biggest pubs group, rallied from 120p in autumn 2020 all the way to 325p in spring 2021 in anticipation of good times ahead. Since then, they have fallen back to 211p. Rival Marston’s has followed a similar trajectory: from 40p to 100p and now back to 58p.
