Virus Blog

4/27/20

Roar or Whimper? My friend Jerry went to cash. His investment thinking is that we won't bounce back. We thinks we're in for a much longer, much slower and uneven recovery that will batter stocks. Jerry is a bankruptcy lawyer and so I feel like he understands downturns. I felt that the stock market would go down back in early November and moved to cash in a very modest way. I've watched downturn after downturn where panicky investors sold AFTER the market crashed. I always thought of them as dumb investors. The right approach is not what it's worth today but what it will be worth five years from now. Decisions should be made based on future strength, not the current strength. When the market initially crashed in mid-March, I happily took my cash and moved it over to equity. I repeated that effort a few times. My friend Jerry, however, has me worried. I'm now hypersensitive to people with similar thinking. No decisions have been made but let's just say this is consuming a lot of thinking time right now. As I write, the market is up so far today.

Virus Blog. Today is Day 46 and this website is all of a sudden much longer than I ever imagined. When it began my expectation was that this would last a "few weeks." We've doubled "a few" and are well on our way to "a ton." The "end," we now know, will not end in weeks or months, but is likey to play at least some defining role in our life until their is a vaccine (optimistically 18 months away), a treatment (lots of testing but few results so far) or some kind of immunity that comes if a ridiculous percentage of us have gotten the virus and since recovered. Recent, but limited, antibody testing reveals penetrations of about 15%. None of this looks promising. Thus, I've concluded that this blog will end before the impact does.

Quick Takes

Airplanes. It's always a little surprising to see an airplane on final approach to SFO these days. But they continue to fly. We saw a story about flight attendants who have been asked to wear masks but no such requirement is being made of passengers. This, of course, misses the point. The masks protects others. Especially on a plane, the rules have to be changed to require face coverings throughout the flight for all on board. Why is that not obvious to everyone?
Mask Wearing. I really don't like wearing a mask.

4/28/20

Elevators. It just dawned on me that there is no six foot social distancing in elevators. The cities die without elevators. What does this mean for the future of commercial real estate. I spoke to a guy this morning whose wife had zero "work from home" flexibility and now after almost two months, the team hasn't missed a beat. His forecast is that many companies will increasingly allow work from home and rethink how we collaborate and what we lose by forcing people to physically drive into the office everyday.

One Million. We hit 1,000,000 cases in the US.

We don't know anyone. We realized we don't know anyone that is Covid19 positive. We keep asking our friends if they know anyone, but so far we don't know anyone who knows someone.

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