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Soon after he offered public assurances that the government was ready to battle the coronavirus, the powerful chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Richard Burr, sold off a significant percentage of his stocks, unloading between $582,029 and $1.56 million of his holdings on Feb. 13 in 29 separate transactions.

As the head of the intelligence committee, Burr, a North Carolina Republican, has access to the government’s most highly classified information about threats to America’s security. His committee was receiving daily coronavirus briefings around this time, according to a Reuters story.

https://www.propublica.org/article/sena ... eparedness

oh what a cunt so he kept downplaying it until he sold his stocks
but oh well, what are a couple of tens/hundreds thousand dead people

"Goldman Sachs warns data point to a historic and frankly apocalyptic surge in unemployment insurance claims, from current 281,000 to 2,250,000 in next week’s report. Yes you read that right."

https://mobile.twitter.com/michaelsderb ... 3389669377

Someone mentioned the WH wants delayed reporting on those numbers but I don't have links/evidence of that.

Gilberto de Piento wrote: ↑

Thu Mar 19, 2020 6:04 pm

https://www.propublica.org/article/sena ... eparedness

And plausible deniability goes up in smoke.
https://www.npr.org/2020/03/19/81819253 ... n-covid-19

uggghh. Just updated my numbers. Now down about 16% compared to the S&P's 29%. That's about three years living expenses. The most damaging psychological impact would hit me at about 20% down. At that point I will have lost all my gains since I started investing in 2015.

Tomorrow will be my second week of DCA'ing from cash to stocks as S&P is still under the 2600 threshold. I've been buying SCV, Total US, and Total international in equal amounts each week. I'm down about 6% from my cost basis on last weeks purchase. I was going to sell a few grand of IAU to purchase OHI in my Roth based on Wed's prices, but I woke from my daytime slumber to find OHI up almost 50% today, so I'll hold off because I can't place a limit order until I sell the IAU, since I already funded it this year and have no cash in it. Oh well.

Valuation based on market cap to GDP (Buffett's favored metric) is now at about where we were at the peak of the housing bubble.

I'm down ~21% in NW FWIW. Portfolio is basically a 60/40 stocks to bonds. It's weird there was one day where the bonds (and index of them) dropped a lot for some reason. News stories said panic asset sales were being translated into funds having to sell short term bonds to cover.

9 months of expenses left.

About 23.4 years expenses still left for me (but over 100 if offset due to outside retirement income considered). Total portfolio down about 13.5% for the year, which includes contributions (so losses are higher by a percent or two). But the loss number tends to fluctuate wildly these days.

I'm down ~6 years of actual living expenses, which sucks......but this too shall pass.

Bets on the recent rally reversing or staying the course?

bostonimproper wrote: ↑

Wed Mar 25, 2020 7:27 pm

Bets on the recent rally reversing or staying the course?

Volatility with S&P500 between 2000-2600 depending on the news of the day. I'm gonna guess it stays that way until we start seeing real earnings and investors can make more informed decisions about which companies are being hit hardest. Then it's anyone's guess how bad earnings have been hit. Any testing ramp up for antibodies or leveling of curve may result in some temporary gains that will be reversed with earnings.
______

Now down 12% YTD or 2.5 yrs living expenses. I'm actually slightly up on the cost basis of my DCA'ing

bostonimproper wrote: ↑

Wed Mar 25, 2020 7:27 pm

Bets on the recent rally reversing or staying the course?

Short term rally within a bear market. Good time to sell into strength before another leg down.

NW YTD +85%

Wow! Glad to see that your crisis alpha strategy paid off big time MI. Almost perfectly timed too.

If I had to do it over again I might wait until the market trends downward before scaling into a larger position. Hard for me to say the timing was perfect as I was a few months early, but for a long while there, put options were really cheap and I bought a lot of them. I definitely did not think I was timing the market, but rather volatility was mis-priced. I suppose compared to someone who was shorting and buying puts for most of the previous 11 years, that the timing was perfect on a relative basis.

This is probably going to jinx everything, but markets are recovering rapidly, much faster than I expected.
From the low in mid March, they are up about 16% and only about 2% off the peak in late February.

Yesterday -25% and today -24.09% from purchasing price.
The relief package has been in the form of bank and other guarantees for medium and small enterprises.

Well, in record time. I'm back to where my investments were at their peak around 18th February...

-24.00%