That being said, there are factors to contribute to this:
- Essentially zero population growth [2]
- A government and a system that propped up an insolvent banking system that likely extended the downturn significantly [3]
- A massive asset bubble that we really haven't seen the likes of, not even in the subprime era. [1]: https://www.macrotrends.net/2593/nikkei-225-index-historical...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan#Current_...
[3]: https://qz.com/198458/zombies-once-destroyed-japans-economy-...
"If things were different, then things would be different."
Japan is way more insular than the US [1]. You can theorize about what might happen if we didn't have net immigration but it's largely irrelevant because we do.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/24/world/insular-japan-needs...
Please do not be flippant or purposely obtuse.
If you're saying this, the real conversation is taking place over your head.
Or are only sea voyages from Europe harrowing enough?
Very true. "Extend and pretend" was the rule of thumb on debt. By failing to let firms go bankrupt, you ended up with tremendous capital (and labor) resources in enterprises which do not create value.
That's a few years off, though. During the crisis itself, when nobody knows whether they'll live or die or what sort of interventions they need stay alive, I expect to see massive panic selling.
It feels morbid talking about this, but:
It depends on how the assets are passed. If most of them are in IRAs, then they'll get passed to heirs as inherited IRAs, and the new SECURE Act in the US will require the heirs to distribute the contents of those IRAs over the next 10 years, which is likely similar to how the retirees might have timed their withdrawals.
I guess it could also go toward the down payment of a house, inflating the housing market even more. If lots of old people die the stock of houses on the market should go way up though, somewhat blunting the impact of this.
SK also has a far lower recovery percentage (SK total cases: 7478, total recoveries: 118; 1.5% of cases have recovered, 0.5% of cases have died).
Compare to the worldwide CFR and recovery rate, which has a much higher CFR (3.5%). total cases 113,432, total recovered 62,494, 55% of world-wide cases have recovered.
That means SK is catching their cases through testing much earlier (which is great! This leads to both better containment and better clinical outcomes!), but it means currently they have a much higher percentage of "unresolved" cases than many other countries. We need to wait until we start seeing more recoveries in SK before we start celebrating too much.
I'm optimistic that there's a good example of a strong outcome when there's a robust response in South Korea.
(Data pulled from the John Hopkins global case tracker here: https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594...
If the only explanation was that they were catching far more low-grade symptoms, then we should see a lower CFR with the resolved cases rising rapidly.
I hope that what you state is the case, and their CFR remains where it is while the number of recovered grows. But it's still an unknown, and we won't actually know until more data comes in.
The reality seems to be that if you're not seriously ill after 7-10 days, it's unlikely you're going to end up on the critical list - never mind dead.
But cases aren't being marked resolved for 2-3 weeks, just in case.
I'm not saying the CFR will go up in South Korea. I'm saying it's still early days to make the claim that it will definitely stay at 0.7%. When we get from 97% of cases being unresolved to something like 85% of cases being unresolved, and the CFR is holding steading, I'll be much more ready to spike the football and celebrate the intervention.
None of which is to say we shouldn't be copying the South Korean playbook closely. They've done a damn-near miraculous job of keeping the number of cases from exploding, and the preliminary CFR does look good. Even if it goes up, it still seems likely that they will have a lower CFR that many other places with a sizable outbreak.
Their response is the bright-spot so far, and we should absolutely be copying their playbook. I'm just saying, it's a little early to tell whether their playbooks is excellent or just really good.
Fever and a cough (usually dry) are the most common symptoms.
Maybe I am wrong though and there is good reason to believe S.Korea is the best example right now to use as a statistics model to apply across the entire world.
Think about it: not a single story about the myriad people who've recovered completely, right? There've been 114,000 documented cases so far and 66,000 have recovered. The number of active/unresolved cases remains well below its peak.
I don't disagree, but my point is S.Korea is not just testing they are treating...if they were not treating presumably the mortality rates would increase. In other words whereas you suggest testing is proving the mortality rate is low, who many of those who tested positive received treatment? and further, got better because of treatment?
Testing is the key to treatment and minimizing mortality rates, other countries are failing on the testing, so it can be presumed they are also failing to treat (how can you treat when people aren't being tested).
There aren't really any treatments broadly available. They're holing people up in hospital beds and providing supportive care if needed. There's a few antiviral treatments in the pipeline.
That is pretty important for people at risk. Consider lack of supportive care is what leads to most preventable deaths from regular flu progressing to other issues that will result in death, not the flu itself. For example dehydration and lung infections can be monitored and treated.
But you're focus on people hacking and wheezing their way to death. You're ignoring upwards of 5-15% of those people who will have to be on a ventilator OR WORSE. This is NOTHING like the flu.
You would do yourself a favor also to examine what it is that Italy, Wuhan and South Korea are going through to try and stop it. They certainly aren't "GOING BACK TO WORK."
No, it's because I'm not overweighting risks that are trivial for the vast, vast majority of people. Of course if you're over 80 and have 3 pre-existing comorbid conditions (as is in Italy) you should be careful. If you're under 10, nobody's died. In fact nCoV-19 doesn't really even spread between children. If you're under 40 the mortality rate is 0.2%, and that's a worse-case number including folks with co-morbid conditions.
Risk exists, and we should be comfortable with it. I recommend reading Schneier's essay on our decreasing tolerance for risk [1] and how it can often lead to us doing ourselves more harm than good.
You have a 1% lifetime risk of dying in a car accident. You've got a 2% lifetime risk of dying of an opioid overdose.
> But you're focus on people hacking and wheezing their way to death. You're ignoring upwards of 5-15% of those people who will have to be on a ventilator OR WORSE. This is NOTHING like the flu.
Yes, it is like the flu. H1N1 Influenza A has a ~10% mortality rate in the elderly, similar to nCoV-19.
> You would do yourself a favor also to examine what it is that Italy, Wuhan and South Korea are going through to try and stop it. They certainly aren't "GOING BACK TO WORK."
Really the economic and individual harm and impact there has a lot to do with what they're doing to try and stop the spread. The cure is worse than the disease here.
They probably should go back to work, though, and in China, they already are. They should wash their hands and stay home if they're sick, and get back to work.
[1] https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2013/08/our_decreas...
Just as a reminder, the 2009 H1N1 pandemic killed maybe half a million people (150,000–575,000) with a CFR of 0.01-0.08%.
Here, current CFR estimates are 5 to 100 times higher.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/preliminary-in-season-e...
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2017/p1213-flu-death-esti...
[3] https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/statements/2017/flu/en/
So far 80,000 people have died this flu season alone. If you're not hoarding canned goods for influenza, you shouldn't hoard canned goods for nCoV-19.
What really matters though is to keep the raw number of confirmed cases low enough so that hospitals don't get overwhelmed. If hospitals get overwhelmed, fatality rates go up. So containment is key.
This number would be smaller than both of the ones you mentioned, unless you think that somehow all actual cases are detected.
And "actual cases" would be the people that have the actual disease, not the people that just carry the virus. For people who are carriers but are not infected, they apparently don't want to mix those people into the numbers because that's not how other illnesses are counted either.
Sure, as long as you mean "actually slow the spread of infections through responsible personal and social choices" and not "sandbag the numbers because it looks bad for you politically."
Presumably you think Korean health care is better? Now what a about other countries?
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.04.20031104v...
It's the difference between .5% CFR and 3.5% CFR.
This isn't the god damn flu and its irresponsible to say so at this point.
At current mortality rates, if this infects a good chunk of the world then we are talking about as many people dying worldwide as died during WW II.
Making future projections based on past deaths without considering the appropriate epidemiological model is like being in a car hurtling at a brick wall and saying, "We will be fine, none of us are hurt yet!" It is literally the same category of mistake.
This is the first time in recent history that the media has not been sensationalizing anything, and actually has been underreporting the danger, after ignoring the outbreak in China for a month.
>because the folks there have on average 3X as many co-morbid conditions
Except they're also reporting a non negligible number of young people without comorbidies requiring hospitalization. The death rate is about to skyrocket because the hospitals are reaching capacity. Even in Lombardy, which has one of some of better healthcare infrastructure, things are grave.
No nation on Earth has nearly enough surge capacity to a handle 5-15% hospitalization rate which includes people in their late 20s (though rare).
Again, things are bad in Italy, yes, because the north is full of old folks with comorbid conditions.
There's no world in which 15% of Italy is going to be in hospital with nCoV-19. Even in Wuhan, there were a total of some 80,000 cases (an overestimate) out of a population of 11 MILLION in the city alone, and 19 MILLION in the metro area. That's (using the lower bound) 0.7% of which only a 5000 were severe or critical, or 0.045%.
A far cry for 15%. You appear to be off by 3-4 orders of magnitude.
You are continuing to not understand causes.
The cause of the spread stopping in Wuhan was because China put 46 million people on a fairly draconian lockdown. For a month now. Streets are empty, people don't go to work, etc, etc, etc.
Unless and until a large fraction of the world does the same, the rest of the world should expect exponential growth. Not the exponential decline that Wuhan is experiencing. Furthermore if the rest of the world does not, eventually China will be faced with having to choose between the nightmare of permanent economic disruption due to quarantining the rest of the world or the nightmare of mass casualties from letting the disease run wild.
And I guarantee that if your life was implemented by similar public health measures, you'd be screaming bloody murder.
I'm making two separate arguments. (1) the disease is fairly well contained at the moment due to the actions of the CCP in China -- cases dropped from 80K to 17K there (and global cases are down to 42K from a peak of 58K) and that's good numbers; (2) even if the world got it, it wouldn't be nearly as big a deal as the preppers, doom-sayers and the breathless media are making it out to be. Through a combination of actually pretty low mortality rates and the fact coronaviruses are well enough known (SARS, MERS and of course 15% of the common cold) that a vaccine and potential treatment has a big head start.
61 million folks got swine flu in America and 12,000 people died here alone. So far, 500 people have nCoV-19 and 27 people have died.
Wash your hands, don't lick things outside you shouldn't be licking, stay home if you're sick, and we'll be past this in a few weeks.
#2 on current data, I said that the number of potential casualties is on the same order as WW 2. Another poster gave numbers showing that this is true even with the optimistic end of current numbers. You have supplied no data to counter those numbers. Nor have acknowledged that tens of millions dead is worthy of concern.
About the rest, my sister and niece are immunocompromised. I have always had weak lungs. My father-in-law is 89. “We” might be past the epidemic but the odds are high that someone close to me will be dead. I doubt that I am alone.
You are not exactly coming across as being full of sympathy for entirely predictable tragedy.
You are grossly misinformed if you think that number is anywhere near correct. For a multitude of reasons - people weren't being tested, test kits ran out, hospitals turned people away, cause of death listed as pneumonia, bodies burned without being tested.
The Chinese numbers are CCP PR bullshit. Once again they would not shut down the entire GDP for two months over something so benign. They would not close down Mecca - the holiest site in the world for 1-2 billion people - over something so benign.
We'll all find out soon enough. The US is quickly approaching the high derivative portion of the exponential curve.
The reality of the reported numbers are sufficient reason for the various actions that have been taken. There is no need to assume conspiracy and coverup. There is doubly no need to tell people who are using the most widely reported numbers that they are grossly uninformed.
The US is not only doing effectively nothing to slow the spread, but isn’t even testing at the level necessary to assess relative regional threats and take necessary mitigation/containment actions.
Arriving at a result anything like South Korea entirely depends on us responding like South Korea, something for which the window of opportunity may have already closed on in the US. We’ll certainly find out in the coming weeks and months.
In most outbreaks, "confirmed" usually means those sick enough to seek medical attention and get a diagnosis. If asymptomatic testing goes up then CFR declines, but then CFR ceases to be a useful metric for comparing and contrasting outbreaks. Arguably it already has diminished utility in this particular outbreak because of inconsistent testing criteria around the world.
I think what most people want to know (and what they believe CFR means) is the percentage of deaths among the infected. But AFAICT this sort of number isn't very common in the literature as ascertaining the total number of infected for most outbreaks[1] is very difficult, and presumably something that can only be deduced post hoc with modeling.
[1] Ebola being one possible exception, given the extremely high lethality and distinctive symptoms.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%9320_coronavirus_ou...
They know something that you don't. Which is that the test has both a high false negative and a high false positive rate. Which means that its effectiveness as a decision making tool is limited.
That said, the longer you wait to start quarantine, the longer you have to keep quarantine measures in place. But on the flip side, if extreme responses are too good, then you increase the risk that on the next serious threat, people will yawn and fail to comply.
Public health has a wicked problem here. The more effective it is, the less that people feel it is needed.
I think a lot of people would rather just let the virus spread.
It's been really is very easy to see the future up until now. There's 9000 cases in Italy now; by the 16th of March, factoring in the containment measures, they could be 60-80k.
About 10% need intensive care; there's probably 3000 IC beds available now. Very simple.
- Social security could have it's date of insolvency extended. It's currently predicted to be insolvent by 2037. Most pension programs in the world will be relieved of pressure if many of those over 60 years of age die. Many states with pension crises may delay those crises many years.
- we may see the largest wealth transfer in history in a short period of time as many older folks die and leave their heirs with whatever wealth they have that they were unable to consume in retirement.
- The economy will "lose" the spending power of this older generation, but that spending power will be transferred to a younger generation. Except for what the government steals via a death tax, this should be net zero in terms of money spent in the economy. What will change is what the money is being spent on.
- Many homes may go on the market as these older folks that own much of the housing stock pass away. Those inheriting the homes will sell or rent. In the case of multiple children sharing the inheritance, homes will be put on the market as those children want their liquid share now.
- Those in their prime productive years should carry on, so hopefully productivity as measured by GDP remains more stable than if this disease killed more people in their prime working years.
- What's most worrying is the people this disease kill between 40 and 65 years of age, since their is a lot of accumulated wisdom, knowledge and expertise in that cohort that is still being actively contributed to society through work and other forms of productive engagement.
If this really does take out 2% and that 2% is largely isolated to those over 60 years of age, we're going to be living in very very interesting times.
My biggest concern is losing a lot of that voting block as older voters often serve as a check against naive ideas that younger voters have such as wanting to try socialist policies wholesale at scale at the federal level instead of experimenting with those ideas in the safe confines of state or local municipalities to determine if they are actually workable ideas.
The US Federal government has both a literal and a figurative money printing press. Congressional appropriations create money. Revenue is an obsolete concept for currency issuers. As a Federal program, it is literally impossible for the program to be "insolvent". Social Security benefits can be paid at full rates for as long as Congress decides to do so.
Not at "real" rates, because a bunch of stuff Americans consume is produced overseas, and if the government starts printing large sums of money then exporters in other countries are going to demand more of it in payment for goods, so the purchasing power of the amount paid to retirees will decrease.
If we get war after the plague that'll carry the death rate down into young men, and perhaps spark further plagues.
That swings both ways; older voters also tend to stand in the way of necessary reforms, like ending the Drug War, or similar "law-and-order" policies that end up being counter-productive.
While I won't pretend there isn't a naive, full-blown socialist contingent amongst some young backers of Warren and Sanders, it's a little frustrating when the signature policy (single-payer healthcare) isn't some kooky "experiment", but a functioning norm in the rest of the industrialized world (usually with statistically better outcomes). Obviously that's not trivial to replicate, America is larger and less homogenous, there are good arguments against single-payer, yada yada yada. But it's a far cry from an "experiment", let alone from "seizing the means of production".
At any rate, I do favor implementing policies at state and local levels, whether socialized medicine, or actual experiments like UBI. But let's a keep a little perspective, and not succumb to naive categorization based on a locally-scoped Overton window.
Good comment overall but this is just unnecessary. I'm guessing you prefer the heirs stealing via birthchance tax? Either way, zero net change in spending (the governments also spend).
what does this even mean? You can't steal what is given to you.
As others have pointed out, "insolvency" for SS is nothing more than a policy position.
> Many homes may go on the market as these older folks that own much of the housing stock pass away
At worst this would speed up the inevitable (at least as some see it). This coming change has been talked about for years and is known as the "Silver Tsunami" [1].
> My biggest concern is losing a lot of that voting block as older voters often serve as a check against naive ideas that younger voter
Here's where you go off the deep end. The irony in all this is that the demographic hit hardest may well be Fox News and Trump's core constituency. I certainly don't wish anyone ill here but if it's going to happen anyway, it's hard not to see the silver lining.
Older voters are increasingly a huge problem, politically speaking (IMHO). They have no concept of long term consequences. They're just trying to avoid anything upsetting the apple cart in the short time they have left here. They fight change of any sort. They're easy pickings for fear-mongering and, as a group, incredibly easy to manipulate.
Your concern about "socialist" policies at the Federal level I'm afraid puts you in a huge voting bloc in the US of those who see no way to solve certain problems that literally no one else has (eg gun violence).
Reasonable people can disagree about how best to provide health care to people but the current system of being tied to employment is an unmitigated disaster that simply has to change. Doing things at the "state" level isn't necessarily better either as all you end up doing is creating 50 regional monopolies that all need to duplicate the same effort.
[1]: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/these-housing-markets-will...
FWIW, it’s most definitely not stealing.
The problem with rugged Capitalism in healthcare is eventually you run out of other people’s immune systems.
[1] https://dqydj.com/nikkei-return-calculator-dividend-reinvest... (I did Dec 1989 - Jan 2020. They don't have data latter than that)
But in that case, you're better off buying a bunker and bullets and long life stored goods. because gold is useless if the country you're in fails!
The only other use for gold as far as i see is to dodge a country's foreign exchange restrictions, to launder money discretely, and to dodge inheritance taxes (if that's even possible with gold jewellery...).
Gold being an excellent conductor while being mostly inert, solid at room temperature and highly malleable seems to be a pretty useful set of properties.
> because gold is useless if the country you're in fails!
Not entirely true. You have to look at why gold became one of the earliest mediums for exchange in the first place. I'd list six primary properties:
1. High density
2. Relative scarcity
3. Distinct appearance
4. Solid
5. Inert
6. Malleable
It turns out density is a really important one. Why? Imagine your country stamps gold coins. If you can take a coin of unknown origin and weigh it against a known good coin, you can pretty easily detect a forgery by it having lower weight. Gold isn't the densest element but it pretty much was until modern times. The only one other that was reasonably accessible was platinum, which was pretty valuable in its own right.
Even the apocalypse will have trade and need a medium for exchange.
> The only other use for gold as far as i see
You're not looking far enough. Gold has been used in places where the local currency has become questionable due to, say, inflation, (effective or actual) government confiscation and so on. Even refugees as recent as the Vietnam War would try and escape with gold.
In recent years India tried to invalidate bank notes in circulation with very little notice that set off a bit of a panic. That's not a problem gold has.
That hasn't been required since the middle ages. So if modern society reverts back to using gold for trade (because there isn't a currency left, that's what the dollar collapse means), I'd rather have stocked up bullets and kill those who has the stuff i want, rather than trade for it. After all, there's no guarentee that they won't just shoot me in the back after the trade anyway.
What i'm saying is that anyone in a western country that invests in gold is implicitly investing in a hedge against collapse of the dollar (or currency in general). And in the event of a collapse, the gold is going to be useless, if you don't have the bullets to back it up and defend yourself.
Or, speculate on the price - sell when it's high, buy when it's low. But that's literal gambling, not investing.
Exactly. It feels like we've swung way too far to the side of "put your money into the market and forget about it". We have no way of knowing what the future looks like. The average bear market wipes ~35% or ~4.5 years worth of gains from your portfolio. Avoiding even a bit of that can have a substantial effect on your savings in the long run.
Of course, timing the market isn't easy, and I'm not giving any advice on buying or selling. But the idea that these peaks and valleys don't matter simply isn't true. They matter, a lot.
Timing the market is just throwing the dice. Go down that path and you’ll be entering the world of gambling with all of the bad psychology that ensues.
There's no reason to ignore dividends. If you look at total return then it's above the high.
Nikkei is down 36% since January 1990 if you reinvest dividends. Do you have a source for your claim?
But, useful inferences for the current market are left to the reader.
Maybe more a reflection of how the index is managed.
(Edit to make this less flippant: like bubbles in education, housing and stocks.)
Those aren't long term problems if you compare them to Japan's. It has been 30 years+ since 1989, and I'd believe that is long enough time for the bubbles in US to correct themselves.
For example, SH [0] is an ETF that moves inversely proportional to the S&P 500 index. So if the S&P 500 is down 2%, SH goes up 2%.
More exciting are the leveraged ETFs that track double or triple the underlying index. SDS [1] moves 2X the inverse of the S&P 500.
ETFs can be bought like stocks. Unlike mutual funds, their prices change throughout the day. These funds can be used to hedge against losses in your retirement or option portfolios. Trade with care!
However, if you look at ETFs like TMF over time, short-term gains easily overcome the decay. If you'd invested in TMF on Jan 1, you'd be up 92% now.
And it's not like options and shorts don't come with premiums. There's no free lunch, but there's the possibility of returns wildly beyond your initial investment.
Consider a hypothetical index having a volatile week (like these days). The index was at 100 on day 1, dropped to 90 on day 2, recovered back to 100 on day 3, rose to 110 on day 4, and finished the week flat at 100.
If you were invested in an ETF that tracks the index, you would neither lose nor profit. But if you were invested in an inverse ETF, you actually lost money overall: the percentage day change of the index is -10%, +11.1%, +10%, -9.1%. So the percentage day change of the inverse ETF is +10%, -11.1%, -10%, +9.1%. Add one and multiply these, and you would have lost 4% overall. This is not even accounting for the increased expense ratios of these ETFs.
But wait, here's more: if you were invested in a 2x leverage ETF, you would have lost 4% as well! The percentage day change would be -20%, +22.2%, +20%, -18.2%. Add one and multiply these and you arrive at the same number.
This is simple math. And I think, this should convince everyone that inverse and leveraged ETFs are terrible in typical volatile market scenarios. Link to spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1XEyE4DxXOilXz4PnGBSX...
If you really really want leverage, consider having a long /ES future with suitable level of leverage, and roll quarterly. For the typical Hacker News audience who are not finance professionals, don't even think about shorting the market.
You also need to learn a lot about options, the Greeks, the IV, and all. With VIX in the fifties, it's very well possible for a trader to lose more money through the small stream of premiums paid for options than the market itself: the market will rebound, after all, but the premium once paid is lost forever.
I do not think options are appropriate for non-professionals.
You'd have to approach it more like swing trading than buy-and-hold type strategy, unless you're aiming for something like next year.
Presumably you are in fact bearish going into the trade. If not, you probably shouldn't have traded the strategy in the first place.
Expect a massive rally when the Fed announces QE4. Buy the rally at your own risk.
The largest DJIA rally in history (15.34%) occurred in the middle of the Great Depression in 1933. Second place was yet another Depression-era rally of double digits.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_daily_changes_...
Bear markets suck people in and spit them out. Every rally seems like the end of the misery, but it's just more of the same.
Only consider buying stocks when nobody but nobody thinks it's a good idea. When "buy the dip" has utterly left the popular vocabulary. When dividends + valuations are at bargain-basement levels.
I would say the above is definitely true for certain sectors of the market now. Energy (oil & gas) comes to mind. Perhaps banks and emerging markets too.
The broad market, on the other hand, isn't even down 20% yet.
Let's hope, good chance to scoop up some cheap(er) put options.
But even for longer time horizons, I think the common wisdom that stocks are low risk over a long planning horizon is overblown: https://web.archive.org/web/20170911171611/http://www.norsta...
> Bear markets are paved with the blood of optimists.
I agree with exercising caution in the sense that trying to time the market is difficult and probably inadvisable in general, but I don't agree that people should be careful specifically because of the recent drop.
IMO the time for caution was weeks ago when the market was much nearer all time highs and it was clear the Coronavirus' growth rate was not under control (and that the measures necessary to contain it might reduce economic growth). Now is a considerably worse time to exercise caution.
People investing for the long term should probably have equities as a substantial portion of their portfolio. If someone doesn't already, I think it would be a mistake to hold back just because the market has dropped. The market may go up or down from here, but the alternative investments of cash and bonds aren't obviously better choices (and it's expected that stocks will be pricier than they were in the past if bonds return less than nothing after inflation). I think a lot of how things play out will depend on future political decisions around monetary and fiscal policy that are not realistically predictable.
In order for some people to beat the investment average by timing the market someone else must underperform the average. Active investment management is in general a zero-sum game in which you compete with a bunch of math PhDs at hedge funds that do it as a day job (and even they have a tough time). Of course you can win if your own analysis of when the conditions are right is better, but trying to do so is usually not recommended for individual investors.
Holding cash sounds simple but if it goes up from here how do you know when to buy? If it goes down from here how do you know when to buy? And if you never buy, over a couple decades you will almost certainly do worse (Japan is a different case because at the bubble peak their stocks were measurably more overpriced compared to almost anything else in history including where the US market is now). In the end I think the only simple thing is the advice most economics professors would give which is to give up trying to time the market and just buy a low-fee mixed stock/bond index portfolio (with the ratio based on your risk tolerance).
So if someone has $100k to invest, maybe they buy $10k every month of their favorite index fund over the course of the next 10 months. If prices continue to drop, some of that money will buy at lower prices, but if they rebound over the next month or two, at least some of the money will buy at the (current) low price.
Then there's also the possibility of a dead-cat bounce somewhere in all this later on. Even if it looks like prices are going back up, they could drop again, and -- again -- there's still more cash to put in at various prices.
Please don’t go trading!
The optimism is frankly unbelievable.
In this way, the poster you're replying to is right. The reason premiums were so low was that IV was so low, but that was because no one expected the S&P 500 to drop from 3350 to 2750 in a few weeks. The IV is pretty high now, but it's still bouncing around much more than the actual volatility of the SPY index itself. I've seen everything from 30-150% over the past few weeks.
A stock that has gone up like a rocket ship will have a high implied volatility despite no crashes or expectations of declines.
Wish I had put $50k in instead of $1k, but I suppose that's always the lament when an ultra-risky trade goes your way :)
It was really just insurance. I fully expected the $1k I bought to expire worthless, and the first $230 did, but these ones I was able to exit for a nice profit.
I highly suspect the expected value of options trading is negative, but it's useful as a hedge. Really wish I could spend like 10% of my salary on put options for my employer in case I get laid off, but it's forbidden apparently.
I'm going to shamelessly borrow this.
Missing out is very, very expensive.
Apart from short squeezes, markets generally grind higher and crash lower. The left tail of the distribution is usually the thicker, meatier, juicier one. But the mode is usually slightly positive. So it's not usually the blood of cynics, but rather the patience of optimists and the persistence of hard workers, that brings markets higher.
And I would reword the 5+ year rule as: don't put any money in the stock market that you think you might need within the next 5 years.
Similar to how the last few years felt like everything was getting more and more expensive, the current downturn also seems like an over-correction (time will tell if I'm wrong). But what I'm sure is this - if the markets are down for a prolonged period - over 5 years - we have way bigger problems than the rate of return.
Here are the tips that I stick to: - DO NOT try to time the market. Exception: when you strongly feel the market went into an over-correction or you feel the market is highly over-valued. (Graham uses a range between 25% - 75% for stocks vs bonds.) - DO NOT invest money that you need in the short term in the market. Corollary: keep a buffer in cash/high-interest savings account + Treasury bonds for short term needs. - DO NOT PANIC - it's really hard to resist the urge to buy when the markets are going up (FOMO) and the urge to sell when it's crashing. Of all the strategies, this one (buy high, sell low) is guaranteed to return a loss. - For most passive investors, index funds + dollar cost averaging is the best way to go. These days robot managers do a good job of also expanding this into stocks + bonds + international coverage covering more scenarios - for example, a hedge against the US market or one's home market not doing well (enough) in the long run. - Hold individual stocks only if you think you'll hold it even if there's no ticker for it with up-to-date price info.
I split my portfolio into 1) Cash/short term funds 2) Long term retirement fund and 3) Speculative investment. All the money on (3) is money I'm willing to lose (not that I want to lose). That's the only account where I buy riskier bets which are pretty much most individual shares. I keep completely separate accounts to make this assumption explicit and clear.
Where do you find such an account?
More generally, bankrate.com offers comparison shopping for banks, and includes online-only high yield savings. It has a bunch listed at 1.9%, and a few dozen at 1.6% or better:
There's a reason for that: the only good solution is a passive one. Ignore the panic, hold, stay the course, and put more money into the stock market when it's down. The large majority of active traders do worse than the market average because of panic selling in situations just like this one.
> Reported cases of Spanish flu dropped off over the summer of 1918, and there was hope at the beginning of August that the virus had run its course. In retrospect, it was only the calm before the storm. Somewhere in Europe, a mutated strain of the Spanish flu virus had emerged that had the power to kill a perfectly healthy young man or woman within 24 hours of showing the first signs of infection.
[1]: https://www.history.com/news/spanish-flu-second-wave-resurge...
> In this downturn, however, the ground for the next economic explosion after 1500 was being laid. Wages rose and huge swathes of society had more money to spend on consumer goods, from beer to clothing to furniture. With fewer people to feed, the largely agricultural economy could focus more on livestock or specialty cash crops like hops or sugarcane instead of grain. Diets improved and, plague aside, so did health. More and more people were drawn into the market economy and trade networks grew wider and deeper.
[1]: https://theconcourse.deadspin.com/after-the-black-death-euro...
I.e. invest a bit every month or invest a bit when market drops another 15%.
^For entertainment purposes only, this is not financial advice.
If you're looking at this and wondering when to get in, to bargain hunt essentially, and you're asking yourself questions like "today? next week?", you need to step back and think again. Some points to consider:
- If your time horizon is 10+ years out probably none of this matters
- If your time horizon is less than 5 years out, you should really question if you should be in the stock market at all
- Be familiar with the term "dead cat bounce". This is a temporary period of recovery followed by a steeper drop. You're going to see this kind of thing.
- Large market drops often lead to or are because of a likely recession. This can go on for months or years.
- After the GFC the markets went down and then sideways for over a year. You essentially missed nothing by waiting two years. This could easily happen again.
- Learn what "reversion to mean" means. It means that at times the markets generally follow a long term upward trend. At times the market will go above or below that. This can be a useful indicator of whether equities are cheap or expensive. In a given cycle you have boom (above the mean when equities are overbought) to bust (an overcorrection to below the mean when equities are oversold).
Bear markets are paved with the blood of optimists.