undermining the rule of law? that's it for us this week. be sure to follow me on twitter, facebook and instagram, and i'll be back next week right here on "the wal at large." thank you very much for joining us. ♪ >> barron's roundtable sponsored by: ♪ ♪ jack: welcome to "barron's roundtable where we prepare you for the week ahead. i'm jack otter. we begin with what we think are the three most important things investors should be thinking about right now. congress at odds over providing more stimulus to the economy. where the market is headed next. the u.s. is on track to roll out 5g networks. which companies will be the winners, and how do increasing tensions with china change the game? and the covid-19 crisis is dramatically changing the entertainment industry. the future of concerts, sports, broadway and movies. on theware ron's virtual --

barron's virtual round table, ben, we've been talking for weeks about how the market is rallying, seeming to ignore the horrible economic news. but this past week investors seemed to notice. >> yeah. this was the week that we learned big tech can't hold the market up forever. for a while now, the data's been terrible, but the markets just kept going up on the backs of apple and amazon and microsoft, stocks like that. but this week began with rising tensions for china, and that should really hurt these stocks. when they started to fall, so did the rest of the market. and this week we've been getting some really, really bad data. if you look at the jobless claims, another 2.6 million or so. retail sales were awful. those were released on friday. and industrial production is terrible. just really terrible news that's coming out. and investors are really getting on edge over whether congress is going to be able to come together and deliver more stimulus to this market. jack: interesting cross-current there in the market.

bofa came out with a commentary that said they were worried about a hoover moment. you had jay powell saying congress had to do something. even anthony fauci's testimony suggested that, and you've been saying there's lessons we need to learn from '08-'09. >> that's right. it's been -- we've done so much so quickly, and it's been great. i mean, that's partially what helped power this market higher, but it's only helped us for these two months, and we really need more. the fed is doing all it can, but it's really going to take congress to take the next step. and so we're probably going to see something, but the market would really like to see that. especially the fed, the tools there are getting, you know, it's running out of tools. this week, for instance, it does not want to use negative rates. jack: well, he said that, but i'm not sure the market completely believes him. bank stocks, carlton, have really taken a hit, i think partly in fear of negative interest rates. >> absolutely. the market was pricing in negative rates, so, i mean,

that's one thing weighing on the banking sector. banks haven't recovered during this time, and the other issue is the fear of loan losses. banks have boosted their reserves, but a lot of the smart money is saying those reserves are going to have to go up. jack: ben, i know you're going to be looking this coming week at retail stocks. obviously, that sector's horrible, terrible news on friday. j.crew, nordstrom filing for bankruptcy, j, j, jcpenney looks close. any good news possible next week? >> i think what we're just looking for is the companies reporting, companies like walmart, target and home depot to just tell us a little bit about what's happening in may. the numbers we just got were from april, last month. we're already halfway through may, and we want to see are shoppers returning, are they starting to spend on things other than essentials like food. jack: jack, you referred to this as the grizzly-locks economy.

>> yeah. it had to be good enough to keep investors happy but not so good you have inflation. now i think it has to be bad enough that the fed keeps interest rates at zero but not so bad that you get some sort of system ec collapse or banking problems or stock market crash. and i think we're at the right level of bad to keep rates at zero and keep stocks continuing to move higher. jack: meanwhile, seems almost like a strange thing to be talking about right now, but the movement continues toward 5g, not really necessary with wi-fi, but can be helpful in some places. >> you're right. it's a strange time. i mean, we've been talking about it for so long. i think a lot of people are saying who gives a flying photograph fell about 5g right now. i'm stuck in my house where i'm on wi-fi most to have the time. it's not just about phones, it's about things like health care and factories and new devices that are going to be online all the time. it's going to be with us for years to come, so our writer

writes about how to invest in it. first of all, we don't learn some of the uses for these new platforms til after they've been out for a while, some of the biggest beneficiaries are uber and learning those new dance moves on tic doc. right now --, tiktok. right now you want to invest in company like erickson and nokia, think about american tower and chip companies like qualcomm which could be a share gainer. we've got a q&a in the magazine this week. jack: of course, tensions with china could hamper these efforts, but carlton, i want to go to you briefly. all of this could be partially solved by reopening the economy, but that is not an easy thing to do. >> no, it's not. and, i mean, summer entertainment this year is going to look very different. broadway is closed through september. baseball might come back in july, but what's it going to look like. when you look at movie theaters, that summer blockbuster season,

a lot of movies are going direct to streaming. disney has said that it wants to release mulan, it's holding to that july 24th date, but what are theaters going to look like? is it going to be socially-distanced seating, is it going to be digital ordering beforehand for food? we don't really know what's going to be at play there. jack: and we have an interesting story in barron's, andrew berry takes a deep dive into john malone's empire. it's a very complicated gone glom rate, but one of -- conglomerate, but one of the holdings is the atlanta braves are rumors that the mlb and the players' union might be closer to an agreement. we can hope for baseball this summer, but certainly it'll be a brief season if it happens at all. coming up, when theaters might reopen and what movie-goers can expect to find at the multimention. i max ceo richard get fanned is here next.

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♪ we're gonna celebrate ♪ yes! ♪ tubi. watch now. ♪ ♪ jack: with new cases of covid-19 trending down in some places, states around the country are starting to reopen, but businesses will have to operate very differently in a post-pandemic world. imax ceo richard gelfond joins me on how coronavirus will change the movie industry. rich, thank you so much for joining us. in case some people don't know, imax has about 1600 theaters in 81 countries. briefly explain what makes an imax movie different from other movies. >> a regular movie-going experience is kind of a third person where you're watching people on a screen. imax you feel like you're part of the movie, and that's enabled by either filming things with

imax cameras or using algorithms to upload images to imax. what makes it work is the sewer action between -- the interaction between the screen and the seats and the image, and it makes you feel like you're inside the movie rather than watching. jack: and you've got those floor to ceiling screens. but even at home, it's slightly different on a screen with an imax movie. >> you know, we developed new technology that we're starting to roll out. in a movie theater, you see movies in letter box form and sometimes at home on tv you see spaces on the top and the bottom, and we're developing technology to fill the screen and make the image better on large screen tvs at home. we entered a deal with sony. they're manufacturing those sets now and others, and we're starting to roll that out. jack: so you've started to open theaters in china, and you think -- you're hoping, at least, that some imax screens

will be open in the u.s. in july. but, obviously, it's going to be a very different movie-going experience at least until we get a vaccine for this thing. what to you expect that will look like? masks? spaces between seats? >> well, as you said, we're in 81 countries, so i think it'll vary by country to country and even state to state. but the common elements in the early openings now, we're open in hong kong and korea and taiwan. temperatures taken on the way in, social distancing. is so there's every other seat or every other row or some combination of that. some of the places you can't bring food in, some of them they come in pre-packaged boxes. some of them require masks. so out hart been decided yet -- it hasn't been decided yet for north america, but i think likely some combination of all of that will happen. i think at least initially people want to see really how it goes, so you're going to start

with diminished capacity and just kind of go from there. jack: every other seat sounds like a huge hit to your business, but it's a little more nuanced, right? a good multiplex capacity is 20%, and you think even habits might change in terms of when people might go to the movies. >> you're absolutely right, jack. it's not just the capacity issue, but a lot of the capacity today is focused around thursday, friday, saturday night. so even though the overall capacity is low, at those peak periods it's crowded. but the conditions that will lead to the lower utilization rates, the virus, also likely allow people to live their lives differently. so one reason the weekend is so crowded is because people have to go to work the other days. but if people don't return to work or there are split shifts, they'll have different times available to go to movies. so, you know, i don't really think the capacity utilization is going to be a big factor in the early going, and hopefully

there'll be a treatment or a vaccine, progress soon and that'll expand. jack: and you think there'll still be this hunger to go to the movies, we'll want to segal georgia doe on the big screen this summer -- see gale georgia doe. >> no, i mean social experience has been around for thousands of years. you can watch a baseball game on tv, but you want to go to a baseball game, especially imax which is in the blockbuster business, people want to experience blockbusters with their friends, they want to feel like they're part of the movie. you know, i'm really not worried about that. the other key point is the the big audience for imax movies is millennials and young people. and according to science, they're safer and subjective hi they feel safer. so i think the kinds of movies and the kinds of people who want to go to those movies, it's just not going to be that different.

i think for older people and people with conditions, you know, maybe it'll be different, maybe it'll be more streaming. but having spent so much time at home like you have and a lot of your viewers have, i mean, i'm dying to get off the couch. i like my streamed shows and i love my wife, but it's enough already. [laughter] we need to go out and meet people. jack: indeed. listen, i'd love to talk to you about your efforts in drive-throughs. we don't have time for that, but you can see imax in a few parking lots. your favorite movie of all time? >> chariots of fire. it won the academy award for best movie that year, and i just love that movie. it's inspirational. jack: it inspired me on many a run. thank you very much, rich get 2307bd. coming up, we handicap the race to develop a vaccine for

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♪ ♪ jack: more than 100 coronavirus vaccine candidates are being tested at record speeds. which companies are in the race? our colleague al root joins the panel. ben, for all the debates over masks and bars reopening and whether jack howe can go to his favorite tattoo parlor in texas, this virus has killed at least the 86,000 americans. people are not going to fully engage with the economy until there's a vaccine and they feel completely safe. barron's takes a look at where we are in this effort. >> yeah, we did. we took a hook at really two types of companies. we have companies that are focusing on new technologies that could develop a vaccine even faster, companies like moderna, maybe could deliver a vaccine in 9-12 months. then we have the old-timers, the

glaxos which make your flu vaccine and other vaccines too that are going to use the old tried and true ways to try to do that, and that could take a bit longer. we're not really looking at a vaccine for at least a year or two. and is so it's going to make it a little harder for us as we try to reengage with the world. jack:j jack, why does it take so hong to develop a vaccine? >> i'm pretty far from being a there, but just think when you're making drugs, making treatments, you're giving those to sick people. when you're making vaccines, you're giving those to people who are well. the testing takes a long time. i would just say once we have a vaccine and we know it's safe, you might have noticed society is a little polarized when it comes to things like measles vaccines before. so we're not at the finish line yet once we have a vaccine. we still need to get enough people to take it.

jack: al, how should investors be thinking about this? >> well, the funny thing with vaccines, it's tremendous for our economy, so you don't necessarily need -- [inaudible] however, vaccine is a long way off, so one of the things we did is we took a look at a few buckets that can benefit, and when you're doing something like picking an investment, you know, based solely on vaccine development or how the world is going to change in a post-covid world, these things just have to be cherries on the top of the sundae. they're not the ice cream. we took a look at people that make technologies that are going to be integrated in the daily life like contact tracing and temperature scans. the company that can integrate these technologies into buildings and factories and then also the companies that do a lot of the cleaning, because

there'll be fewer e of us in buildings, and we'll be cleaner than we used to be. >> al, i wanted to ask you about that, because there's a lot of companies providing us services, so what were the ones you identified that will help us get back into the office? >> well, it's funny, i think that people should sort of get ready for almost like a post-9/11 environment when the tsa was created. you know, what is work going to look like in the future, to your point. i think that, you know, aside from the fact that there'll be less people in the office because the sort of work from home environment will stay partially, oh, i might be the wednesday/friday guy, jack might be the tuesday/thursday guy, ben still probably comes in every day. you know, and then so there's that. and then on the technology side, you know, we did three companies, right? we did echo lab which is a cleaning giant, fleer systems which is a thermal scanning and camera maker, very big in that

business. that business has already seep a bump, and my perm favorite was zebra. they do a lot of rfid tracking, and that business is doing a variety of things. jack: could you, quickly are, explain how we would use rfid tracking in the office. >> yeah, it's almost controversial. businesses aren't democracies. ben tells me that i've got to have an rfid card in my bag and i need to keep it on me, i'm probably going to listen to him. in the nfl, right, zebra is a technology provider, so when you see those advanced statistics in the nfl, deshaun watson ran 47 yards, and he was going this fast, that's zebra's technology on the pads. and that kind of technology can be imported into any industry so it can tell me, you know, how fast jack types, how fast i'm running away if ben as i see him walking down the hall toward me.

jack: wow. i i think we're all going to have to get used to more intrusion if we want to stay healthy. thanks very much, al. up next, round table members give their investment ideas for the coming week. stay right there. ♪ ♪ now more than ever, you need technology you can rely on. and people you can rely on. i'm a dell technologies advisor. me too. me too. me too. and if you're a small business, we're with you. we are with you. we're with you. we want to help. so we'll be right here. at home. answering your calls. providing support. and standing by you every step of the way. bye bye.

♪ ♪ jack: jack, we've all had to change our habits a bit, but things haven't gotten so bad that you've resorted to watching knight rider reruns, apparently. >> well, it's all the way up on channel 1038. i haven't gotten that high in my cable bundle yet. i'm going to be doing some re-examining. i've got the next week off. i need to fix my tv situation. should i keep this bundle, should i replace it with streaming services?

i know. that's what i write about in this week's street wise column. you can see streaming services are going through the roof right now, but you've seen a little bit of a faster decline in, you know, cord cutting for cable services during the shutdown. and i write about viacom/cbs. i think this actually works to their advantage. their problem was never making money in television, it's the fact that investors seem not the least bit interested with traditional television, they only want to talk about streaming, and viacom/cbs' streaming services are showing rapid growth, better than 50% year-over-year. the stock jumped more than 20% in two days after the company reported earnings. jack: still a huge valuation between them and netflix. maybe that gap will close a bit. carlton? >> it may be starting to drum some of your winners. wayfair had a huge runup, but

when the economy reopens, that made to order furniture online, i'm sure a lot of that was outfitting your home us as. you only need to buy so many office chairs for your home. some of that demand is probably going to taper, so so people who have had huge wins, it might be time to trim it back. jack: it went from 21 in march to 170 recently. ben, you got a much more well known brand to talk about. >> that's right. i went looking for stocks that had underperformed the s&p 500 but not by so much that you had to worry about whether they were going to be around in the future. and one that stood out was coca-cola. it's down around 20% this year, so twice as much as the s&p 500, but that's partially because of the exposure to restaurants. now that restaurants are going to slowly start reopening, we should see that business start to come back a bit, and it's still a great staple company. it still sells stuff that people want. i think it's an interesting one to rook at right now.

jack: great ideas. thanks very much. to read more, check out this week's edition at barron's.com, and don't forget to follow us on twitter @barron's online. that's all for us, (announcer) the following is a sponsored program for prostagenix, furnished by prostatereport.com. (upbeat music) ♪ hi, this is larry king. over 30 million men in america have prostrate problems. i know, i was one of them. and all these natural prostate supplements like the ones i have here in front of me are everywhere. drugstores, health food stores, on the internet, and all over tv, selling millions of bottles every year.