No one saw it coming in January. Everyone saw it coming the week that it was starting, which is my point. It’s really easy to tell when the big players start taking risk off.

These people are also tracking senators and congress people’s positional moves, as additional macro indicators.

Did those same people see the subsequent bull run, that occurred much faster than most were predicting?

There's a lot of people who think they're smart enough to time the market, but have just been lucky. In the long run, that catches up to most of them, which is one of the reasons passive investing wins out in the end, on average

I found private information posted on 4chan around the 28th of January 2020. It spoke of: the upcoming variant strains, the upcoming lockdowns in Italy, the downright panic with public health officials as they were made aware of how awful COVID is and the need to avoid this panic --so large cities would not find refugee in small towns, leaving only criminals and the poor, effects of "long-COVID" and teleworking on the future economy, the sad fate of those who would die after cytokine storm caused their lungs to fill with bloody liquid and choke (financial analysts are more blunt, reputation-free, than epidemiological analysts). That the financial elite was preparing for the upcoming impacts, and that all money managers were working day-and-night to rebalance and counter risks, aware of the possibility of a (malicious) lab leak (economy collapse, world war, CEO's dying, ...).

The posts said that gold would see decent increase (was around 1650$/kg at the time). That everyone with hotel or travel investments was expected to severely lose, and that most such players were putting their liquid money into other investments, to counter the blow, and avoid charges of insider trading. That the Euro would be the most stable currency, when currency trading due to localized pandemic and the lockdowns effecting purchasing power. That the US stock market will see a short boom, with Fed support, and little other investment opportunities, before a crash and world-wide stagnation will become inevitable. That you want to be in two growth niches for the next 3 years: biotech, for it will see free government-funded research & development, when it can profit in the future on new high-margin (HIV/Herpes) vaccines. Plastics industry, because everything will be wrapped in plastic, environmental regulation will be low priority, and it will be overlooked by retail and play-safe pension funds.

Not only did the financial elite predicted it, they predicted it right. Then felt bad for keeping it private, when they saw US senators selling their hotel stock positions after being informed of the situation in China and prospect of a pandemic, so they posted it publicly for everyone to see and with nothing to personally gain.

The pandemic was predicted (+5 -5 year error bars). The correction was predicted. Individual recession predictors are mostly made through survivor bias. When Goldman Sachs sees a market recession upcoming, they don't put that on Twitter or a newspaper to gain a following. They have people pay for what its worth.

It is also fun going back to 4chan /biz section 5 years. People are not saying now: see, I was right. They did better than the majority of the best, highest-paid, analysts and quants and remained anonymous. But I agree it was really hard to not hit a fish when shooting in a barrel.