Ann: Temporary pause in new enrolments for LAVENDER trial in US, page-57

It's 19.9 here


Separately, I received some info from a friend who has been heavily working in the equity market for 20 years.
I just thought it may add some balance / thought as to why someone would sell 14 million shares.






So what’s going on in the markets, why are they crashing over a pause in demand??

It’s quite simple, companies have gorged themselves on debt over the last 11 years. It’s been cheap and freely available.

Debt needs to be serviced, so when you get a shock event like this, it’s very hard to refinance or raise new debt to repay the old.

As an example, there is 36 trillion of corporate bonds in Asia alone that’s just Asia...so 5-6 trillion coming due this year, can they raise money to repay it?! Maybe not. Who’s going to give a real estate company money today to repay their old loans??

The way stock markets simplistically work is that debt/bonds have to be serviced first, “equity” is second. So the stock markets cannot really recover until the debt/bond markets do.

So what we need is a massive amount of government stimulus to stabilize the debt/bond markets before we can see a strong recovery in the stock markets.

We have been on an 11 year “bull market” that is stock prices have been increasing for 11 years in a row. It’s like betting on black and hitting every time, it has to change at some point. This is not a dip, normally bear markets last a while and slowly recover. 2-3 years maybe?? Less if the stimulus works.

But don’t panic. Don’t strip your super fund. Don’t do anything silly. A bit like Ulysses tying himself to the mast and putting wax in his crews ears, you have taken the hit, sail through it, the markets will come back and if you are long term investors this will seem a blip on the chart.

However, if you have cash and are thinking about when to enter, look to the bond markets for the clue, once the big fish start swimming in the bond market, enter the equities. Don’t try and pick the bottom, average in, buy gradually.

Stay safe!

Ps: Coca Colas market cap has halved...that’s not because of a lapse in demand, it’s because they are fundamentally over leveraged. They can’t raise the capital to repay their debt at the same price they raised it before.

Same with the big hotel groups, same with the energy stocks etc

Defence stocks are even down, they have strong balance sheets, but fundamentally because the government must divert money from defence spending to social programs.

Banks are down because they are the first ones whom the government will lean on to get us out of this, just look at NZs mortgage holiday, who’s paying for that? The banks.

So who’s strongest?? Well capitalized primary producers, telcos and dare I say it, software.