Spekulatius

Beware the narrative. Just because you see a picture of a full bar doesn’t meant that it’s a typical situation or they all bars are full. I suspect some people just go out and others don’t yet. Any pickup in case numbers from lack of social distancing will take about 4-8 weeks to really show. At least in some regions (Georgia) they have reduce the occupancy to a level that will reduce the risk of spread hopefully. We will see how it goes. I don’t think anyone can predict the result exactly.

I think you need to look into more detail. I know for fact that Texas didn’t have a statewide shelter in place , but it did have shelter in place in the larger cities like Austin, DFW and is think Houston (not entirely sure on they latter), so essentially they had the same thing where it counts (cities). Being spread out with relatively low population density and without public transport also helped. I think this is at least a large part of the explanation , but there could be other factors (weather etc) as well.

Arn’t most GP/ LP relationships like leech/ host. For a leech/ host relationship the following would need to be true. 1) it’s hard to impossible to get rid of the leech 2) the leech can suck on the host, but it can’t suck it dry without imperiling itself 3) The leech benefits much more with less effort So a hedge fund GP isn’t really a leech because typically the LP can Get rid of him. A closed end fund manager may be a leech, or private equity or the beloved BAM. With MLP, the GP in most cases acts as leech. I mean the GP/LP relationship is basically a codified leeching relationship.

BJ’s contribution to herd immunity wasn’t particular impressing, emergency room visit and all. I also don’t know what came into his mind we he told his nation on Sunday that’s whoever can should go back to work on Monday basically. That’s kind of a short notice. What is sort of ironic is that the UK had tougher restrictions for citizens during the shutdown than most of the rest or Europe (Germany, France, Scandinavia, France) and yet their results are on par with Italy and Spain’s despite having more time to prepare. Germany and Denmark have already eased their restrictions before the UK could.

Every commercial property lessee is going to ask for rent reduction /participation in cost due to COVID-@9 impairments. Have some office space where you can’t fit all the people in the elevator at the same time, or can’t occupy your office space with the same density - well you are going to ask for a rent reduction. Same for pretty much any B&M store which are getting whacked by online retailing anyways. That’s going to have quite a bit of impact for the real estate asset and CMBS loan valuations. Ouch!

I doubled my ABEV today. ;) The thesis for ABEV is as follows: 1) The stock is down more than 50%. 2) The stock has never been they cheap in terms of P/S (as far as I can see) 3) The balance sheet is very strong (net cash) 4) Most importantly: Brazilians like beer (courtesy Of DooDiligence)

I added to CMCSA, TRV, ORI, VIVHY. Started new positions in HDS and ABEV after some DooDiligence.

I haven't been able to envisage the end state here. So imagine you are super-successful like Oz, NZ, Singapore and your cases go to zero. The rest of the world (ROW) screws up and muddles its way to group immunity, perhaps at horrific cost. So ROW have 70-80% people with immunity, and the virus is still circulating. Now you have three ways out. 1. Vaccine is developed and you get immunity without the horrific costs. 2. The virus is totally eradicated. 3. You live in your bubble, separate from the rest of the world until either 1 or 2 happen. This doesn't seem like a viable option if its a long time. So whats the end state these guys are thinking of or hoping for? I wouldn’t necessarily discount the possibility that bilateral travel bubbles form between countries with a low enough prevalence of COVID-19. In fact both New Zealand and Australia are thinking about this and this would help out the New Zealand tours industry as most tourist come from Australia. I can see other bubbles forming in other regions like Northern Europe and later southern there Europe if the number go down far enough. You only need to do this for 18 month hopefully until a vaccine is there and / or you can reduce the risk of adverse outcomes with better medication. So they would be the end state since you ask for it. Since I am basically located in a COVID-19 leper colony here in MA, I am not counting of going anywhere far this year, certainly not Europe as I planned. It’s probably going to be a camping trip north, if those folks from VT, NH or ME will have us. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/05/trans-tasman-travel-bubble-to-allow-flights-as-soon-as-lockdowns-ease-morrison-and-ardern-agree

That's an important "but" that can't be hand-waved away. A lot of antibody tests had false positives in the 50% range, depending the population being sampled (it'll be higher outside of the major outbreak zones). That's way too high to be very useful. Stanford Dr. Bhattacharya says he had 0.5% false positive in his test. The 0.5% may be important for Santa Carla study that found 3% infection rate. But still you can take 2.5% and calculate IFR. 0.5% false positive is not important for NYC with 20% infection rate. Or Boston Chelsea with 30% infection rate. The different studies gave infection fatality rate between 0.1% to 0.5%. NY had higher rate at 0.5%. For example Miami Dade study gave 6% and 0.5% is not very important. https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article242260406.html They say 165000 infected. Presently about 500 dead (I dont know numbers as of mid April). So a conservative number of using todays 500 deaths/165000 gives 0.3% IFR. Below is a study by Denmark: Using available data on fatalities and population numbers a combined IFR in patients younger than 70 is estimated at 82 per 100,000 (CI: 59-154) infections. Thats 0.082% for patients younger than 70. The seroprevalence was adjusted for assay sensitivity and specificity taking the uncertainties of the test validation into account when reporting the 95% confidence intervals (CI). New tests are even better. See below: Researchers at the University of Washington School of Medicine found Abbott’s test had a specificity rate of 99.9% and a sensitivity rate of 100%, suggesting very few chances of incorrectly diagnosing a healthy person with the infection and no false negatives. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/08/study-suggests-abbott-covid-19-antibody-test-highly-likely-to-give-correct-results.html Some people dont like the result of 0.1% to 0.5% IFR but it is now done by Denmark, Germany, Santa Carla, LA, Miami Dade, NYC, Boston by different well known professors and hospitals. The IFR is much lower if you take less than 70 population. At one point people need to agree with the data. I agree that some areas (NYC, Chelsea MA) are reaching numbers that imply that we are well on way of herd immunity. It that a true only in those heavily hit areas, not true in the rest of NY or MA and much less the rest of the country. It not true in Sweden either, Stockholm, Sweden represents only 10% of the Swedish population and that’s where the majority of the infection are for now. I am routing for the Swedes, they have a clear plan and are following it, so far within a fairly acceptable cost. Germany and other Skandinavien countries have pushed the curve far far down, so they have a chance squash the second waves ( the extend of which is a function of how far down the first wave have been pushed ) with aggressive test and track. What is our strategy? It depends on the state you are in and we just have to wing it. Sad.

How do we know where it "matters most"? Masks. Nursing homes where more effort is put in separating infected from not infected. Better ventilation and training at Nursing homes. We are fighting the Virus on twitter and with the Fed. So far, the Virus doesn’t seem to care.

Yeah a day after the St Louis Fed came out stating that they don’t want low interest rates. You can’t make it up. He may need the negative interest rates to keep his cardboard box empire from collapsing.

A big hacker attack would most likely hit conventional and less IT savvy business more than the GOOG , FB‘s , or cloud service or SAAS providers. If anything it would speed up the move to the cloud and would benefit larger companies relative to smaller ones.

What if workers start calling out sick at slaughter houses, processing plants, distributors, trucking companies, and most important of all perhaps, FOOD RETAILERS. There is no way I would be working at a grocery store stocking shelves, unloading trucks, working cash registers for $10, $12, $14 an hour. To an extent, that happened in the Detroit Post Office. We are not getting daily mail delivery in my city. The Post Office tries to do it, but some delivery routes can't be made every day. The distribution/sorting hubs sometimes had 90% worker outages. For a while, all outbound packages were being routed to Indianapolis for sorting/shipment. Many of my packages took 2-3 weeks to be delivered. 1st class letters were taking 1+ week to go across the city. There were simply not enough workers coming in. The Post Office was very close to collapse. In the past few days, things seem to have gotten better with the mail. I've also heard that more workers are coming back. Things are still difficult, but not like what they were. A lot of businesses won't function if workers don't show up. If there is a 2nd wave, that could be a real problem. They need to pay more and/or get rid of the $1200 UI weekly subsidy quickly. Worst implementation of good idea ever. They should have just bumped the UI benefit to a higher percentage of salary. With the current incentive structure , a large part of the American population won’t get back to work - a middle school student can do the math on that one.

Externally managed REITs are almost as bad as SPACS especially when the external managers are AAMC crooks.

Let’s hope they fly ;D

Risk know them - avoid them seems like a good https://www.erinbromage.com/post/the-risks-know-them-avoid-them It’s quite shocking to read the case studies about how one person in a choir could infect many people in the church after a couple hours of exposure for example. On the other hand the risk to contract COVID outdoors seems to be vastly overrated, so politicians really should open parks and beaches.

This weekend, I trimmed my wife’s hair around her neck and now I am grounded for the week.

Seems like we need to close down the White House, quarantine the inhabitants and deep clean it.

^ Good comments from Broeb22 above. My company started to use Workday and it is for better then the system we had before (Kronos and some SAP integration) just from a user experience perspective. Another thought - most of the benefits of new technologies over time should accrue to the users over time. Maybe that’s already happening, but it doesn’t quite feel that way.

Kind of investment related and pretty good. https://twitter.com/justbrosef/status/1259266070759845890?s=21

Ye, and increasing infection rate is expected when you open the economy back up. Germany has opened up some schools, more stores are open and some factories (automobile) have started back up again. It is interesting to note that there was also an outbreak cluster in meat processing plant as well ( Coesfeld). That triggered a setback for this county in terms of opening the economy further son e a threshold of 50 new cases/100k population was exceeded. Almost logical. :o https://www.dw.com/en/coronavirus-outbreak-closes-german-meat-packing-plant/a-53374478 As in the US the meatpacking plant outbreak occurred with guest workers (from Bulgaria) with not that great working and living conditions. The virus is very good at finding weak spots apparently.

Hmm, who could have known: https://www.channel3000.com/72-got-covid-19-after-being-at-large-event/

I also think mortality rate will come down because we will learn how to treat patients better over time. That’s why I personally think it is better to get infected late rather than early personally. I also know for sure they Germany and many other European states try to avoid the herd immunity route. Germany and opened schools again and some business and does test and trace to contain new outbreaks. Same with other Scandinavian states. Perhaps Italy is too far in and Spain in some areas at least to try this, I don’t really know. I do think that the US has lost the optionality to avoid the herd immunity route, because the shelter in place were were lifted early, so the case load is probably too high for test and trace to work. We will see how it works out, I don’t really know what the best route is. I hope the best for Sweden, Germany, the US and all other nations to obtain a workable solution with a manageable human cost, but some area quite clearly doing much better than others for a variety of reasons.

https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/article/3083627/coronavirus-hong-kong-records-no-new-cases-covid While these are success stories now, I'm afraid once they open up the borders/businesses again... Boom. Boom? They'll keep screening people at the border and international travel will be pretty low until there's a vaccine or at least better therapies. Any time they gain now by crushing the curve and containing it is fewer deaths before a vaccine. Well, let's see what happens. I'm just very curious to see how these countries start to easy the lockdown measures, and how they will handle potential 2nd or 3rd waves... Just look at Singapore, and now S. Korea where a single club goer has caused another possible outbreak... which led the government to shut down bars/clubs again. Seems like they will have to go back and forth with measures, for the next 12+ months... At some point, I'm afraid that the whole society will lose its patience/integrity. The whole society will lose their integrity because they can’t go to bars? C’mon. Also, we keep talking about lockdowns, but the US and Europe never had any “lockdowns”. We had “shelters in place” that are quite leaky, in some countries/ states more so than others. In my state, many stores were open (hardware, groceries, liquor and of course drugstores), parks open, takeout food available and many business declared essential etc so people still went to work as usual. That’s not what I call a “lockdowns. lockdown is what the Chinese did when they prevented people from leaving their apartment for any reason. We never had a lockdown in the US or Europe.

The Swedish models isn’t different than the US model effectively except the Swedes do with intend what the US does wby accident and of course the Swedes have a much better outcome (no collapse of their health care system in Stockholm vs NYC). What I do not get is - even if Stockholm reaches heard immunity until fall, that’s only 10% of their population (Stockholm has ~1M people vs 10.3M Swedes), so they still will have 10x more cases overall when Stockholm is done. NYC probably reaches some level of heard immunity too, and possibly some hard hit areas in the NE (Boston, Connecticut), but again that’s only a small part of the US population. There is still a lot of uninfected humans in both countries to work through. If that’s our strategy anyhow, how about estimating some numbers. US 340M people, let say we infect 60% with a 0.75% mortality rate and get there without crashing the health care system somehow. That’s 1.53M dead by my math which needs to be seen relative to the ~2.8M natural death rate in the US. Maybe that’s what it is, but I have not seen this spelled out in a WH meeting - this is our strategy and that how much it’s going to cost us and that is how we minimize the damage and the risk of the health care system crashing etc. Instead, the WH says, we are going to have 100k dead and we are winging it and see what happens.