As an investor, it is important to seek out forward looking facts, and to use one's intelligence to discern fundamentals, to stay ahead of the mass comprehension curve.
Yes, unusual things do happen that threaten our personal comfort bubbles, but we have to look beyond our rigid habits, because these times are also crucial moments of opportunity.
There's an investment group at my alma-mater, which I belong to. In mid-March, after some debate, they concurred that the sensible thing to do was to heavily short the major indexes - which, comfortingly, also correlated with the actions of a politically connected Billionaire investor.
Unfortunately at the time I was fixated on saving my business from lockdown - only now, in quarantine, do I have time to review some past emails, review news sources, and share insights.
The investment group are now looking for the market bottom indicators, and the money they have made placing shorts will be bet on a V-Shaped recovery, as the world is awash with oversold assets.
Most intelligent investors well understand that simply regurgitating market information from the mass media, reporting the previous days market movements, is like driving by looking into a foggy rear view mirror, one has to look forward to stay on the road.
As the chartists do here, looking for recurring patterns of human behaviour, and how they are triggered and interact with fundamentals, is very valuable, and this practice extends beyond trading data, into the big wide world.
That is exactly how George Soros claims he made his billions - (while dignifying it with the philosophy of Karl Popper). _______________________________________________________________
So it's interesting to observe, for example, that the four nations public health HCID group made an interim recommendation in January 2020 to treat COVID19 as a High Consequence Infectious Disease.
That was done because very little was known about COVID19 at the time, but the potential was very worrying.
As much more became known about virus and the illnesses it causes or exacerbates, the UK HICD continued reviewing the virus against HCID criteria, and on March 19th they decided that COVID19 is no longer a an acute infectious disease with a high case-fatality rate.
The Advisory Committee on Dangerous Pathogens also supports this opinion, but the mass media of course ignores that.
The true fatality rate appears to well under the one in a thousand benchmark. According to reports from Oxford, that with more and more people are being tested, it's clear that the vast majority of test subjects are experiencing very mild or undetectable symptoms.
Also, see the chart below that illustrates that only 0.8% of recorded COVID19 deaths in Italy were caused by COVID19 acting alone.
Not too taxing to comprehend the implications or relevance of the information on the pie chart, if you wish to?
So why the panic? Why the demands to cripple the world economy? Why the easy acceptance of the huge human welfare cost of social and economic lockdown?
If lockdown continues million of vulnerable people in the third world will die - and apparently it's "evil" or "irresponsible" to be concerned?
OK, quite clearly we've seen some supposedly intelligent people can't, or chose not to, comprehend the difference between scientific truths, political gaming, and share market reactions - but may I be permitted to say, on this public thread, that this data gives me a lot of hope for the welfare of humanity. ______________________________________________________________
So that raises the question, for those with active brains, if COVID19 is truly not a "superstar" killer virus, what is really going on?
And here we have to be grateful that there are leaders who, maybe a little too human, believe in free dynamic societies, and don't publically preen themselves as a perfect examples of people-kind, or as Roman gods.
If can give one example of opportunistic collusion, that often can look like conspiracy - I have a old Uni mate who has risen to be a Senior Editor for a major Global News Organization - and it's clear talking to him that the game is purely about making a big story - that's how he got where he is today.
The way he determinedly pushes aside hard information to focus on emotive hooks says it all.
His personal obsession with identifying with the globalist elite too has a strong whiff of hatred about it, hatred for "mediocrity" - that means "ordinary" people.
Yet frankly, he is not a god, he is still only a cog, desperate to serve his boss - one of the most powerful individuals in the USA.
OK, so the media has really enjoyed themselves over this medium scale health issue, and loved the power, but if you have any respect or comprehension of comparative data, you can quickly see that COVID19 does not even make the world "top ten" infectious diseases list.
That is why I believe the markets will rapidly recover.
And if the hysteria can be put back in it's box, or at least the hysteria curve flattened, millions of people in the third world will not need to starve, nor will the developed economy need to collapse.
The problem is >90% political. Now that the banks can now make money from the upturn, and the US media figures COVID19 is not the issue that will shoo the senile hand-puppet of massive insider corruption, Joe Biden, into the White House, things will return to some sort of normality. _______________________________________________________________
If, as up to date evidence suggests, COVID19 is dangerous to people with serious existing medical conditions, particularly those over 70 years old, but a small danger to everyone else, then shutting down the entire world for a long time is probably a bad idea.
But as long as the media hypes every coronavirus comorbidity, as if these are the only deaths that happen, it will need a brave politician to take a country back to normality, and risk being loudly blamed for even a single coronavirus death.
Far easier for the power hungry to take the martial-law route, particularly with this weird admiration of the very brutal, dishonest and dysfunctional Beijing regime being put about. _______________________________________________________________
It's very true that society is much more than just an economy, but there are huge social welfare costs involved in crashing the economy, so we might try to comprehend that society is also more than just a virus - a pretty mediocre on at that.
Who recalls when media and government went into overdrive to scare us all about AIDS (1985 Life magazine cover: “NO ONE IS SAFE FROM AIDS.”), and we were told even French kissing was a grave danger? (I was a teenager).
It's now shown that public officials were knowingly lying, and of course the mass-media is a font of misinformation at the best of times. Tell me, how many clean living hetrosexuals did actually die of AIDS?
Now we've also have so many scares, like the one about killer bees making the USA uninhabitable, or "the inconvenient truth" from "very important" people worldwide, that New York would be largely flooded by 2008. They seem so comically stupid now, we can hardly believe they occured, but "top officials" lined up to lie at the time, amplified by media.
If an Academic really wanted to do something really useful, he/she/they might catalogue all the many major political beat ups since (say) 1980, review their causes, the protagonists, the gamings, the truths and lies, the broad effects, the real ultimate casualties, and the side effects.
Compare and correlate the information and you get a document that would be hysterically funny and absurd, if it weren't so tragic and sad. ______________________________________________________________
Well this epic note has passed a couple of hours of quarantine time. When I waved to my wife out my window this morning I felt quite sad, but the remedy is to distract oneself with an honest purpose - combating fear, ignorance and humbug.
Can I reassure PB that I have decided I now will focus on preparing for my upcoming day of freedom, and so have decided I won't continue intruding into her thread, sharing information and such like.
I wish you all well. Humanity will meet again on the other side..... for laughs and beers.
(20min delay)