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tng

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  1. Low levels of investor allocation of equities to bonds doesn't really mean too much in my opinion. That could simply be interest rates going up from near zero.
  2. The business model of a brokerage is inherently safer too, as it is mainly a fee driven business. They won't fall into the trap of reaching for yield. I think it's pretty safe for high networth individuals or companies because the broker mainly acts as a custodian and the assets are not comingled with the broker's funds (or shouldn't be, that's what all the audits and federal regulations are suppose to ensure). Technically it is possible for there to be widespread fraud or malfeasance and a lot of client assets are lost, but that's basically impossible at a major brokerage that has many layers of checks and security. Roku keeping so much money at a bank account that probably yields 0% is insane, especially given that you can find good short term yields right now. No idea what the CFO and all the finance people there are doing. I know SIVB offered a lot of perks to leave large sums of money in their bank accounts, such as cheaper rates on loans and credit facilities, etc. It was very favorable for small businesses with a few million dollars. But with hundreds of millions of dollars like Roku, it seems insane.
  3. I feel like I am in a split world where one half of the people think we should lockdown forever (to "play it safe") and the other half has been working for the past 6 months and being fully exposed to the virus, so they have gotten over it already. For the white collar office worker that can work from home indefinitely, nothing will make it safe enough. Say we have a vaccine that is 75% effective (which is probably too optimistic). If the current probability of death is too high, is cutting it down by 75% low enough for them to go rushing back onto the subways and going back to the office? Probably not. Is some not very healthy middle aged person with 1% of death going to come out at 0.25% of death? Meanwhile, on the other side, you have someone who has been working at Walmarts, supermarkets, delivery, supply chain, etc that have been working through the pandemic and they are sick of the lockdowns trashing the economy and their kids' futures. Many of them have already been infected (in big cities, probably the majority of them). They've already taken the risk and all the benefits of the lockdown all go to this protected class of white collar workers. Some people seem to be trapped into this indentured servant role where they prefer not to work at a Walmart, but they can't quit (no unemployment for voluntarily quitting), they can't change jobs because everything is closed, and they make less money working than someone sitting at home collecting enhanced unemployment, so obviously they are screaming about how the lockdowns are a violation of human rights, because they feel like they are in a slave class. I'm not really sure how we get out of this. The virus is not catastrophic, which is why most places are partially reopen. But it's also not completely safe. Maybe people didn't respect the flu before, but even if we get COVID down to the same level as the flu (i.e. we have a COVID vaccine that is about as effective as the flus), is that good enough for all the WFH crowd to come back out? If something that is 3x the flu is too dangerous, is the flu itself too dangerous to come back out? And at what point is it too unfair to the people that have been working through the pandemic that they revolt?
  4. It's also not clear if low Vitamin D is just a marker some other deficiency. Supplementing with vitamin D may be different than being able to naturally have high vitamin D. It's probably a good idea to supplement with Vitamin D if you are low because it's well studied and safe, but it might not be the miracle supplement if you are doing other things wrong.
  5. Comparing present U.S., European, and Asian numbers have a lot of flaws. The U.S. got the virus later than Europe, who got it later than Asia. And in the beginning, nobody was counting COVID cases/deaths because they didn't know COVID was a thing and they didn't have testing ability/capacity. Who knows how much it spread before they started counting. If the COVID deaths curve goes way up (meaning it is extremely widespread within the population) and then flatlines, the region probably has herd immunity. You can't remove the virus from the population when it is that extremely widespread. Too much noise in the data and people focus too much on where the theoretical threshold for herd immunity is. You know it when you see it, and that is when the deaths go away.
  6. Surprised by the JPM sale. Maybe it's tax harvesting? We know he's been adding to BAC recently, but I always thought that most of the big banks these days are very similar, with WFC being the exception because of all their legal issues.
  7. I think play accounts will just psychologically mess with you. Most people will take more risk than they should because it's not real money. And if they are lucky, they will lose all their fake money and learn a lesson out of it. If they are not, they will win a lot of fake money and then become overconfident with their real money.
  8. With household infection, there probably isn't much you can do (you are probably infected by the time you realize that someone is sick). But in terms of office space or retail space, if "circulating air" is what is important, then air filters should also do a decent job because the good ones are rated to filter out particles as small as viruses. I have a theory that stuff like dust (which is all over the place indoors) could be a potential transmission vector as people are breathing it into their nose and breathing it back out and dust or pollen can fly around the air because they are "fluffy" and have large surface area and low density. This could be one of the reasons why masks seems to work in reducing infections even though they are ineffective at filtering out virus-sized particles in a laboratory. Virus infections could actually come from the virus riding on larger particles that we breathe deep into our lungs and breathe back out. Outdoors, the dust is dissipated pretty quickly so we don't keep re-breathing the same particles.
  9. I think anybody investing in Tesla should be 100% concerned about how big of a role Elon Musk plays in it. He has a cult-like following and that contributed greatly to his ability to raise capital for the company. There were a few times where Tesla seemed to be at the brink. I think some percentage of his employees buy into him and they might not follow another person. Tesla wouldn't have worked without a person like Musk, but Tesla investors are also at the mercy of his weird quirks and impulses.
  10. I have a feeling that this vaccine will be a lot more tricky than people think, because of how this affects different groups of people. For people under 20, it basically doesn't affect them. It affects very few people from ages 20-30. Then starts ramping up as people get older. So if we do come up with a vaccine, are we really going to inject it into all the kids and risk the unknown long term side effects? Most kids would probably prefer getting the actual virus than rolling the dice on an unknown drug. Would you inject it into your toddler? If COVID-19 is as deadly as Ebola, people would be lining up to take an experimental vaccine because that gives better odds for survival. But since it affects certain groups more than others, people in the safer groups are not going to want to take the mystery vaccine or it simply won't be approved for that reason. There are something like 100 vaccines in trials already. One or more of them will likely be the vaccine that we will use in 2 years. But we are not going to accelerate the studies because this virus isn't deadly enough to risk potential unknown side effects. The more realistic black swan on the positive side is a treatment that decreases death rate and speeds up recovery time.
  11. At some point, science is going to prove common sense again and we will learn/confirm that the majority of New York's cases (and likely Boston's cases too) come from their reliance on their subway system. That is six million people in extremely tightly packed trains with poor ventilation every day (likely two trips a day, mostly during rush hours). I suspect that the subway system at New York combined with the international travel due to New York City being the premiere business hub in the world is actually the biggest vector of worldwide transmission and spread. How do we reopen New York City without an explosion of cases again due to everybody needing the subway system? That is a very hard question. Maybe New York will have to operate for a while without subways (it would be a pain for a lot of people). But sparse rural areas in the U.S. should not be waiting forever until New York figures that out.
  12. What happens when shelter in place ends? Or are we just not going to end it until we discover a vaccine? A lot of the "open the economy" people are simply pessimists that think we are going to be forced into the herd immunity route whether we like to or not. It's not that they don't realize that staying in lock down prevents deaths right now, that's obvious, but a life isn't saved because someone is moved from one sinking boat onto another sinking boat.
  13. Also, the question is whether that $2 trillion is a one time cost or if it is a $2 trillion per month cost, because so far there is no obvious way to reopen without most people eventually getting the virus anyways. Are we going to pay $2 trillion a month until there is a vaccine?
  14. Yeah, once you look at the false positive rate and false negative rate of existing tests, and then look at how many people use the subway system in New York and Boston, you have to become very skeptical that it will work. How many false positives are going to be in one train alone (let alone the dozens of trains during rush hour)? You'll end up tracing down the entirety of the city on false positives alone. And if you let a single false negative into a system that transports millions of people a day, you are fucked. The thing that sucks is that tests for this virus are not very accurate. That's why I think that the actual reason why South Korea isn't hit as hard are actually due to far more simpler reasons, such as face masks or low obesity rate.
  15. I think people are wishing it is Trump's fault because that means there actually is an obvious solution that will come out. I don't think anybody could have done much better or worse. I don't think anything could have been done at cities like New York that has large international travel and relies heavily on the subway system. The virus was likely seeded already before anybody knew about it and the large cities were screwed without draconian Wuhan style quarantines and nobody could have done that. The only obvious mistake I see is the absolute fiery conviction that western doctors had that civilians should not be masked. Even now, I think there is a lot of blind faith that testing and contact tracing will work. I think it is actually getting more and more likely that we will be forced into the herd immunity route whether we like it or not.
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