nov 26 reuters  companies benefiting from this years economic reopening including amc entertainment united airlines and carnival corp were hammered on friday by fears over a new and possiblyvaccine resistant coronavirus variant the variant discovered in south africa prompted several countries to tighten border controls and investors to dump asian and european equities for safer assets read more trading before the bell showed us stocks were set to join the selloff with carriers united ualo delta air daln and american airlines aalo losing between 8 and 9 hotel chains hyatt hn marriott maro and hilton hltn fell between 47 and 6 while cruise operators carnival ccln royal caribbean cruises rcln and norwegian cruise line plunged 10 each theater chain amc amcn lost 62 little is known of the variant but scientists say it has an unusual combination of mutations may be able to evade immune responses and could be more transmissible read more the economic recovery has been quite impressive and the one thing that could knock it over completely would be a more dangerous variant time will tell how worried we should be but investors are selling in front of potential bad news said ryan detrick senior market strategist at lpl financial the news of the variant however sparked a rally in last years stayathome darlings such as fitness company peloton ptono streaming giant netflix nflxo and zoom video communications zmo sending them up between 6 and 9 investment gods have given the latetosell investors a second opportunity to do so because the stocks that did well in the covid lockdown like peloton or zoom are probably going to do well once again said sam stovall chief investment strategist at cfra research reporting by akash sriram subrat patnaik sruthi shankar and bansari mayur kamdar in bengaluru editing by aditya soni