Retirement balance with the current market?

Market makes no sense at all right now. The economy is circling down the drain yet markets are up. Don't get me wrong, I'm OK with them being up, but the behavior is puzzling to say the least. It's as though they're anticipating something I'm not. Amazon in particular has fully recovered and renewed its 52 week high. Also Amazon's AWS (their real, actual cash cow) seems to be way busier than usual, which bodes well for quarterly earnings.
 
Market makes no sense at all right now. The economy is circling down the drain yet markets are up. Don't get me wrong, I'm OK with them being up, but the behavior is puzzling to say the least. It's as though they're anticipating something I'm not. Amazon in particular has fully recovered and renewed its 52 week high. Also Amazon's AWS (their real, actual cash cow) seems to be way busier than usual, which bodes well for quarterly earnings.
The markets are AHEAD of what is happening in the economy; they base everything on the future, and the future continues to be bright, corona is an anomaly not a problem with the us economy.
 
The markets are AHEAD of what is happening in the economy; they base everything on the future, and the future continues to be bright, corona is an anomaly not a problem with the us economy.

That's true. But it's naive to expect that the economy can just pick up where it left off after a 2+ month hiatus. There will be a drop in output, if for no other reason than there are now 16M+ people without jobs. Probably over 20 by the time the next stats are reported. I get that probably the majority of the people laid off are only laid off temporarily, but still, it will take some time for us to recover from this, at which point we're likely in for a second round of this bullshit. This is not a free ride for sure.

The only thing that could explain any of this is that e.g. Western Europe is hit much harder than we are, so there's really nowhere for that money to go, and there's a lot of uncertainty about what retaliatory measures will be taken by everyone against China, and how much they will devastate the Chinese economy, so going there is not a safe bet either, especially considering that they're lying about their C19 stats.
 
The markets are AHEAD of what is happening in the economy; they base everything on the future...
If only you could count on that. The markets frequently react to events instead of predicting them.
 
You already missed the bottom if you arent back in...
Me thinks we are in the rumor phase of restarting.

Rumors sound and feel good. I started to feel better today as I signed up for my stimulus check and also Oregon's governor discussed slowly opening the state up again. However, the governor mentioned no timeline but rather a list of conditions that needed to be met before doing anything. Can the market and economy wait another 1-3 months?
 
no timeline

There really can't be a "timeline". This is an executive decision, not a scientific one, in the sense that there's no good time to re-open in the absence of a vaccine. Essentially you're screwed whichever way you go. More people will get sick. More people will die. This was the plan all along - to flatten the curve, not reduce the area under the curve. This is why, I think, governors are banding together so that it could be a "collective" decision and you couldn't pin the blame for either re-opening or not re-opening on just one guy.
 
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While we are in quarantine, the economy goes down. Even if we opened everything up tomorrow, economy would still be declining because people have no job, no money.

Buckle up, the worst yet to come.

Edit: That's just the economy part, we still have to deal with the virus!
 
Family of 3 gets something like $2900 stimulus check tho. I think I'll be getting one accidentally. My wife and I took almost all of 2018 off (by choice), and we made well below the eligibility cutoff that year. So apparently we'll be getting $2900 even though I made a ton of money last year, and this year as well. I figure the least I can do is return it to the US economy by buying an expensive US-made acoustic guitar.
 
Yep, just checked my bank and there it is: $2900 from "IRS TREAS". After decades of paying massive amounts of taxes, it's nice to get something back for a change.
 
Watching one of the pundits this morning and he was talking about selling puts. I hate puts, but it makes sense. You get paid for the contract, and if the stock price goes down, you get to buy it at a lower price.

Edit: so looking at NFLX at record highs ($415) you can sell 1 put to buy NFLX at $350 expires May 15 and pays $665. Hmmm.
 
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If only you could count on that. The markets frequently react to events instead of predicting them.
Yep both, but never do what 'everyone' is doing or you will always lose. When everyone is selling and panicking, buy, when everyone is buying like there is no tomorrow hold or sell.
 
Yep both, but never do what 'everyone' is doing or you will always lose. When everyone is selling and panicking, buy, when everyone is buying like there is no tomorrow hold or sell.
when your excited enough about a stock that you recommend it to a friend.... you should be selling
 
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