Castanza

Sold 50% of remaining SPCE puts to free up some more cash

Thanks for sharing, FWIW I appreciate your logical approach to most topics on this forum. I agree that scalability is certainly possible in the US. But it will most likely take military precautions as you've mentioned. The thing I struggle with is what are the secondary effects of this thing. I can see similar effects with both "letting it run its course" and "lets shut everything down". But both of these have a common input which is uncertain (severity). Until the severity question is answered I have a hard time saying lets preemptively lock down the whole US economy. I guess I'm in the boat of "take personal precautions, and encourage businesses to take precautions as well." Either way I smell massive taxpayer funded bailouts on the horizon.

And be thought a fool by everyone with a strong opinion? Better to remain silent. ;) @orthopa I think what folks are saying when saying testing is important is that identifying as many spreaders as possible is key to containment. You can't catch them all. Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good. Some folks spread to 1 person. Some spread disease to dozens. You want to eliminate as many spreaders as possible so that the disease population can't reach escape velocity. Basically to the point above about the number sick at any given time being semi-controllable. Whats your plan for asymptomatic people/kids who don't seem to be affected and dont go to the doctor? I already answered. You can't catch everyone. Any additional you do catch early can moderate the number sick at any given time. You might not be able to control total number to get sick, but spreading that number out over a longer period leads to far better outcomes in aggregate. That's why people are testing. Further, WHO says adult to child transmission is more common than reverse, as opposed to seasonal flu. To the "it's been here for 1+ month" comment, viruses compound when no one has immunity. I don't disagree with this point on spreading it out, but what exactly is the threshold (number of patients a hospital can hold)? Healthcare capacity is derived and constructed off of averages and then scaled according to population. A pandemic by nature is already over-capacity right? If I had to guess the threshold is quite low and I'm doubtful any solutions will be effective. The US is especially difficult to contain and isolate due to its size, efficiency and reliance on individual travel (interstate) compared to small countries like Germany (who funny enough just announced 3/4 of their citizens are likely to be infected). If small countries that heavily rely on public transit can barely contain this thing how can a vast country like the US contain it? I guess scale could make quarantining sections of the country possible, but with the reliance on individual transit it feels like a bucket full of holes trying to carry water.

Just an observation: It seems a lot of individuals greatly underappreciated the scale of the Interstate and road systems in the US. Not to mention the sheer land mass of this country. Comparing the lock down of a country the size of Minnesota (that heavily relies on public transit) to the US is apples to oranges. Containment in the US is magnitudes more difficult.

Where I live there are no confirmed cases. Life has been going on as usual. Costco and Wegmans have not been overly busy and I saw people with *gasp* one pack of toilet paper. Schools are still open. My employer has allowed us to work at home if we want. Bars, breweries and pubs are still packed. As far as I know there have been no reports of unusual amounts deaths. Say tomorrow the CDC rolls in and magically test everyone in the local area. And 30% of those people test positive. What has fundamentally changed about my area? Edit: And I agree with precautions (hand washing etc)

MAXR starter under 13

"Extinction" of what? Was thinking the same thing haha Since I typically derail threads I'll be a hypocrite and say lets move the conversation here https://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/general-discussion/coronavirus/msg399288/?topicseen#msg399288 ;D

Good thing we have the Negotiator in Chief! ;D

PLNT (Starter) DIS

Tickling match? I’m OK with the drop if that’s what it takes to get rid of this douchenozzle. That’s happens when you let Republicans run the economy. . Bush Sr -1991 Bush Jr 2001& 2008 Trump 2020 Then look at his favorite industries : Coal, oil and steel. Must be bad luck. I wonder if Obama is still claiming credit to this economy? Perhaps we will see a tweet taking that back? For the record I think it's dumb for any president to make claims to economic conditions.

A little: RDS.b, WMB, RTN, GRBK, HHC, SAVE, UPS and JETS

It's 9:40AM here...too early?

Everclear 190 is made for situations like this

People avoiding the quarantine in Italy.

Did you even read what he wrote? Where does it say anything about spending money? Taxpayer money? Isn’t it assumed? Maybe I read it wrong, but isn’t he saying govt SHOULD take precaution? I mean govt effort or lack of efforts seems to be the core theme in this thread. I meant nothing in this post about government at all, and I don't believe that this thread is or should be about politics. Nor do I believe that arguing about domestic politics has that been the motivation of most people here. Personally, I was thinking of Taleb's comments with respect to reducing health risk for individuals and with respect to portfolio management. If there are those who would like to argue about the government response, and argue in a non-productive way as we have seen before on CoB&F, I would suggest this topic has become large enough to create a separate thread within the Politics section and potentially another thread within investment strategies to discuss portfolio management in the context of COVID-19. Ultimately we are all here as investors, but let's not forget that some of us have already lost friends or family to this epidemic and more certainly will. I have many close friends on this board who I value immensely. Many of them are older and some are older with health issues that could put them right in the cross hairs of this virus. I worry for them and selfishly I fear for my loss were there something to happen to them. I just found the original context of Nassim's comments, and I have to admit I don't fully understand the context, especially the disagreement: I especially don't understand his spat with Tetlock: Taleb's deragotory comments addressed at Tetlock seem unnecessary and I think engaging with a variety of viewpoints would be valuable in this situation. I think this board would similarly benefit from a variety of viewpoints and we could all be more welcoming by focusing on the ideas and not attacking individuals, but focusing on the specifics of an argument and responding with an argument that is even more well reasoned. From watching the interactions of several others on this board in the past couple of days I think the discussions would have been better if everyone could have refrained from the use of "you" and tried to refrain from making assumptions or at least questioned their assumptions about other people's motivations. There has certainly been a mix of comments in this thread. But the government aspect of this is undoubtedly connected to the investment side. The context in which government is referred to has been both on and off track at points. Whether or not government decides to quarantine large swaths of people will most definitely have an impact on the market and the economy. Domestic politics and the political aspects of this investment thesis have been touched on by pretty much everyone in this thread.

Did you even read what he wrote? Where does it say anything about spending money? Taxpayer money? Isn’t it assumed? Maybe I read it wrong, but isn’t he saying govt SHOULD take precaution? I mean govt effort or lack of efforts seems to be the core theme in this thread.

Well, I’m more in the Taleb camp on this one: https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1235663235573067777?s=21 I particularly liked his comments about forecasters. He essentially said that just because you put your seat belt on does not mean you are forecasting a car crash and just because you lock your doors does not mean you are forecasting a burglary. That statement works simply because it’s so broad. How far can you take that? Should every state have a few hospitals with 10k beds laying in wait for the next pandemic? Preparedness is different when it’s funded with tax dollars. To me, that statement only applies to things that are statistically common and have a reasonable chance of happening. Pandemics aren’t common by any means. Should we all start building bomb shelters in our back yards? I mean it could happen!

Morgan Housel sums the whole situation up nicely.

Finally got some nice weather here in PA. Trout fly season doesn’t start for a few weeks so what’s a guy to do? Michters no1 and an Argyle Banquet

TLDR (WSB analysis) ;D Buy Calls on top 5 largest ventilator manufacturers. Philips Healthcare (Netherlands), ResMed Inc. (U.S.), Medtronic plc (Ireland), Becton, Dickinson and Company (U.S.), and Getinge Group (Sweden). Some of the other players in this market are Dräger Group (Germany), Smiths Group plc (U.K.), Teleflex Incorporated (U.S.), Hamilton Medical AG (Switzerland), and GE Healthcare (U.S.)

No, the concept simply shows that if you can squish down the curve, you get benefits, which is hard to understand for the "well, the genie's out of the bottle, it's all pointless, nothing to be done" crowd. And it does change what is coming, nothing about this is binary. Not shown on the graph is also the possibility of a vaccine, so you could draw a vertical line at some point, and the part of the cruve that gets squished past that line could also have it a lot better by vaccinating the most at-risk populations. Where the chart goes wrong is by showing healthcare capacity. It's disingenuous. If current healthcare capacity is sufficient to handle COVID-19 then that would imply Covid-19 is no worse than influenza. So either COVID-19 is not similar to influenze (which is what I'm hearing on here) or the other healthcare systems are full of shit about their "exceptional healthcare advantage". The chart is a better representation of spending flexibility and that governments ability to levy tax funds. No governments "current" healthcare capacity is built for pandemic levels. Everything from beds, to machines, to supplies on hand is based on averages. It's still flawed though because there is not way to represent actual cases since the majority are probably unknown. It's a difficult line to walk as the ability to levy funds requires timing, discretion, and responsibility. I prefer a leader that adheres to the aforementioned traits within reason. China was extremely flexible and they now have tons of small businesses going belly up. I wonder if those citizens are happy they avoided a "mild" flu (according to CDC) at the expense of their business and tax money? And I'm not saying there wont be significant economic impact in the US. And I'm not saying China should have handled it differently. I'm just saying there is more than one way to skin a cat. Someone mentioned the Fukushima meltdown earlier in the thread. Sometimes fear (cough cough media) can do more harm than whatever it is you're actually scared of.

What constitutes "Healthcare system capacity"?

WMB

Troegs Perpetual IPA

Thanks. We are doing great and not losing any sleep. Just staying informed exercising reasonable caution. +1 Yeah, I'd +1 that too. I don't want to diminish what's going on. This thing is definitely a nasty bug. But the reaction to it is definitely weird. I lived in Toronto during SARS (I actually worked on the subway during the crisis) and I lived in London during H1N1 (England was one of the harder hit places). But I don't remember anything like what is going on right now. There was a general level of concern (I started to cough in my elbow) but life pretty much went on as usual. I don't remember being any shortage of masks in the heath care sector. People definitely didn't stockpile masks. The markets certainly didn't care because we were all fucked at that point anyway. I just don't get why things are so much different this time. Social media