Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Orange.
Orange who?
Orange you glad this email didn’t start with something about #Corona?
And with that bad dad joke (picture your own dad calling you with that one), we present our Quarterly Market Review for Q1 2020.
Q1 2020 will certainly be one for the history books; the stock market notched both an all-time record high, and the fastest and steepest bear market on record, all within 30 days of each other:
Click here to download our Q1 Quarterly Market Review
A couple other resources we put together if you or someone you know needs them:
What Emergency Cashflow Options Should I Consider During the Coronavirus Pandemic?
What Issues Should I Consider If I Lose My Job?
What Issues Should I Consider During A Recession or Market Correction?
There is some good news to report in that scientists are making unbelievable progress on tests, treatments, and vaccines for a virus that was just found in humans 3 months ago:
Testing to find it:
Treatments after it’s found:
Vaccines to prevent it in the first place:
More great news in that we’ve significantly ramped up our daily testing here in the US:
Furthermore, the rate-of-change of new cases has been coming down the last couple days:
Look on the far right of that chart – the last several days of data shows we’ve slowed the rate-of-change in new cases down to less than 14% per day. It’s not the 0% that we’re all waiting for, but it’s much better than the 75-100% daily growth rate we were at about 10 days ago.
That means we’re finally ‘flattening the curve’. As much as I hate what these lockdowns are doing to my beloved economy, they are working:
(again, I have just a bit of an issue with how this data is displayed, as the Y-Axis needs to be scaled as a percentage of population, as it looks like we are doing worse than Spain and Italy, even though we have 5x as many people as Italy and almost 7x as many as Spain and will therefore naturally have more cases…. although China is 5x the size of us….)
But that’s enough of the ‘Rona for now. I think we’re all a little worn out and could use a break over the weekend.
So instead, here’s a little pick-me-up from the young British artist Stephen Ridley. As he describes it:
COVID-19 has got the world on lockdown, quarantined.
Coronavirus seems to have affected us all.
In these moments, I turn to music. To the simple, timeless power of song.
London has a lot of public pianos.
Since the coronavirus hit, and COVID lockdown happened, they’ve been locked shut, closed indefinitely. And the streets have become that much more quiet. Nervous stares, heads down, masks on our faces.
Luckily I found out that had been forgotten.
I dedicate this song to the world:
(Click to play. Volume up for this one.)
(We’ve all heard that song before, but perhaps never in this light. Here and here if you want more of his stuff. Even more impressive after hearing him talk about being hearing impaired as a pianist.)
I have a favor to ask. I am compiling a list of ‘lessons learned’ from all of this that I would like to distribute back to everyone at some point. Once we get to the other side of this and are looking back, we will all have something along the lines of, “Had I known what was going to happen, I wish I would have _______________”.
