First I went to a gold website and saw the bullish gold articles, highlighted by one of the 2 (former) Gold Bears (both having been flipped bullish again by the subsequent rising gold price) touting gold’s parabolic upside just before 2 o’clock Charlie showed up to reverse gold and the precious metals. The article noted a massive “complex inverse head and shoulders” * in gold among the usual side fixin’s. Pure gold bug porn that acted as a beacon for 2 o’clock Charlie to home in on. This was not really a mistake, it was more of the usual time waste checking on contrarian clues.
After that I still had a foot in the abstract world of markets and finance.
But then I made the mistake of following a link inside of my website’s stats page to a gold forum that linked one of my posts. Oh man, the talk of COVID-19 is scary among those bugs. And I am not being a contrarian wise guy when I write that. I actually got scared, as in Armageddon scared. But then I remembered that while I am still drawing breath my job is to manage the market, so I got out of there.
But now I am in the real world, not the abstract financial world.
Then I landed at the mainstream media (MarketWatch) and read an article focused on Macro Tourist Kevin Muir’s fairly dismissive view of the bear. Okay, finally I thought, a true contrarian on the job.
But today even the Macro Tourist, he of as many laughs as insightful market thoughts, is somber and writing with a sober tone. Yikes, I find out, the CDC is not messing around here.
“We are asking the American public to prepare for the expectation that this might be bad.”
Public health experts on Tuesday began publicly discussing the coronavirus as a disease which is expected to spread across much of the world population, including throughout the United States.
The CDC issued a warning Tuesday that it expects the illness to spread in the U.S. and that Americans should prepare themselves for “significant disruption in their daily lives.”
“Ultimately we expect we will see community spread in the United States,” Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the CDC told reporters. “It’s not a question of if this will happen but when this will happen and how many people in this country will have severe illnesses. We are asking the American public to prepare for the expectation that this might be bad.”
So folks, here we are. This is the stuff of movies we’ve seen and gotten the chills to, before flipping the channel to some other fantasy or sporting event or whatever. Unfortunately, with Coronavirus we cannot change the channel. All we can do is hope that the hype and fear are way more pronounced than the reality will actually be. I’ll tell you one thing, the warmer weather cannot come soon enough [not saying it’ll cure anything, just psychological if nothing else].
Okay, now back to our regularly scheduled programming… with this exogenous event that is turning into an economic (and potentially cataclysmic) event informing the work until it no longer is. Oh an also, the Federal Reserve sits in wait. The calls from the president on down to the Macro Tourist linked above are and will be coming in for them to use those tools.
Chinese proverb… interesting times.
* TA speak for a freak H&S with too many shoulders, written to make a mess sound err… technical.
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