In the age of the pandemic earnings season, there have been recurring surprises split right down the middle of the economy. On one side of the economy, the traditional services that require social activity and actually getting out of the house have suffered.

In contrast, the other side of online capable entities has been able to prosper, and in some cases with extremely good results. Something that interests me greatly is the outliers on either side of the spectrum, the oddities that sometimes logic defies where the scrutiny on numbers has become less prevalent to share prices than the management side.

Take Dropbox Inc, for example; Dropbox has benefited from increased demand throughout the pandemic. The necessity for cloud-based services and file transfer for entities that have favoured the work-from-home shift, throughout the globes health woes, has directly impacted on Dropbox revenues with positive results from increased sales. For 2020 dropbox had reported two consecutive quarters of profit with the most recent indicating a 16% increase in sales resulting in a second-quarter profit, starkly different results to the year before where a 21-million-dollar loss occurred.

With the increased in demand, the better than analyst forecasts and the change from loss to profit, you would expect the share price to have risen reasonably well, and it has, but that’s not my focus here. My focus is on the management effect on listed companies, and you see Dropbox Inc. announced for its earnings season results that the Chief Financial Officer Ajay Vashee would be preparing to exit on 15th of September. The stock price fell, investors were more interested in the management than the earnings.

Regardless of the 30% gains on Dropbox and the 30%+ we have seen on Nasdaq listed companies since the March fall, the focus on management has been far more important in 2020. How these businesses have been able to survive, and the leadership behind them has truly determined the winners from the losers.