$5.00 party now on, page-23

If you're talking about a fairly short-term trade to take advantage of the COVID related stay-at-home travel boom then maybe the bus has gone. There could be an unwinding as the vaccine starts to take effect and markets start to anticipate borders opening up again. You can only really make a call on that by comparing INA's current valuation and forecast EPS growth - to me, it's priced for growth but not overvalued.

Whether there will be a longer lasting trend towards holidaying at home is hard to say, but I reckon it's reasonable to assume there will be a shift in holiday styles in Australia as a result of this that will benefit INA going forward. For a start, their main target market for holiday parks is caravanners who include many older people, who traditionally would have been tossing up whether to go on a caravan trip or whether to go on a cruise. As shown last year, COVID and cruise ships crammed full of older people is a terrible combination, so presumably many will opt for a road trip instead - especially since cruises and overseas travel in general need to be booked ahead of time and leave people exposed to cancellations if COVID kicks off again, which it may well do. So it will certainly make the road trip option more attractive for both retirees and families.

Whether this shift to holiday-at-home will be enough to have a material effect on INA's earnings is hard to say, but for me it's pretty irrelevant to INA as an investment proposition. Look at INA's share price since inception, it's a growth stock based on long-term trends towards an aging population, which include all three aspects of the business - rental retirement villages, manufactured home estates and caravanning, which became the most popular form of holidaying in Australia in 2019, pre-COVID. For the bigger picture COVID has just been a bump up in an already rising company and I don't personally think COVID is the value proposition here. It's a 10 year stock, not a short-term trade. Any assistance from the COVID situation here is just a bonus.