It could be but it goes to show why people that overly react to bad news dont do well long-term in the stock market. I wrote an article a few years ago, that I never published, talking about that. In stocks the investor needs to be primarily optimistic but with a certain degree of caution. Its a balance of the two but with a BIAS towards being an optimist. That works because stocks payoff exponentially but have logarithmic (limited) losses. This asymmetry favors longs and punishes people that go to cash or short at the wrong moment. Cash or shorts are big exceptions to the rule, the rule is to be long. A virus (unless its the one from Resident Evil 2) is not a good enough reason to go to cash, I hope readers that lost money or missed profits learned from this experience!
Fwiw I was wrong in a post above, life seems to be far from normal but many offices in Shenzhen have reopened on monday. A friend of mine posted pics of his office working and he is dealing neither in high tech nor essential goods, but rather fashion oriented stuff. Also some restaurants have reopened with people eating on the terrace (without masks) Still surprised at how bullish the market remains - haven t sold any position during the crisis though.
A solid essay by Paul Graham about thinking and writing http://paulgraham.com/useful.html When I get some time I need to go back to reading Graham's essay, they are usually pretty spot on
Here is a fun look at the past. When I was buying EWZ in december of 2015, I took a screenshot of the long-term options structure of EWZ because I thought "hey, maybe its better to buy leaps". But I have some emotional flaws when it comes to options (I hate to blew out losses over and over until I make a big gain) that I need to fix, so I never bought the leaps. But they did return 5-6x if I had bought then. EWZ was at $22 and I would have bought the $35 2018 call for probably about $1.2 or something. EWZ was at $42 in Jan of 2018. 5-6x return, not bad I definitely need to play around with options more
"It is scary stuff. I don't think it should affect what you do in stocks but in terms of the human race it is scary stuff when you have a pandemic," says Warren Buffett on #coronavirus. I agree. Hopefully, stocks collapse so I can buy more. This corona thing will probably be the last great opportunity to buy China before a big run
Buffett 2hr CNBC interview https://www.cnbc.com/video/2020/02/...-ceo-warren-buffett.html?&qsearchterm=buffett
Bought some Berkshire and Chinese stocks today. Stocks are very oversold, good opportunity to buy some value
I also sold most of my 6-10 year treasuries today. I'm holding SHY and cash instead. After the bounce I might buy back some of them
I also think there is a decent chance that GILD's drug remdesvir will work against coronavirus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remdesivir I mean, it already works against other 2 types of corona (MERS and SARS). And they are doing a 1000 patient Phase 3 with novelcoronavirus patients. So if they can do a 1000 patient trial, they can probably treat way more than that. So there is a chance they will treat this going forward and all the scenarios people are extrapolating will be proven wrong