The S&P has gone through the 200 day and 200 week moving averages. Next obvious point to watch out for is where the market bounced in December 2018 - around 2350.
That’s assuming the trading algorithms are even looking to buy based on anything technical at this point…maybe they’ve all blown up…
Trading algorithms are a nice idea, but defining anything to a machine in a useful enough way is really hard. They will always act erratically when they are met with unknowns. Despite a fruitful career in designing algorithms. I firmly believe they have no place in trading.
I am thinking they now might have to. I am a shareholder and believe in the company long-term, but those are scary times to be an oil company.
The demand is almost non-existent with all the countries shutting down, and on top of that the OPEC and Russia are forming a showdown for some reason right now.
Yup, the wealthiest own the most shares. They make their assets work passively and actively for them. They teach their kids how to work with their money and make the money work as oppose to only how to pay your bills on time and spend on things.
If it gets as far as large scale bail-out’s (nationalisation?), I wonder if it lead will lead to some form of regulatory balance sheet and/or cash flow “strength” or capitalisation requirements for listed companies?
Who’d have thought a bit of lurgy would cause such chaos?
Airlines are the first to be likely bailed out and some of them have already been halted for trading. Yet, bear in mind that the biggest US airlines spend the last decade 96% of free cash flow on buying back their own shares.
This is turning into corporate socialism. Mismanagement of large companies paid for by the taxes of the little man.
Some light evening reading from the team behind UK modelling:
Perhaps our most significant conclusion is that mitigation is unlikely to be feasible without emergency surge capacity limits of the UK and US healthcare systems being exceeded many times over. In the most effective mitigation strategy examined, which leads to a single, relatively short epidemic (case isolation, household quarantine and social distancing of the elderly), the surge limits for both general ward and ICU beds would be exceeded by at least 8-fold under the more optimistic scenario for critical care requirements that we examined. In addition, even if all patients were able to be treated, we predict there would still be in the order of 250,000 deaths in GB, and 1.1-1.2 million in the US.
In the UK, this conclusion has only been reached in the last few days, with the refinement of estimates of likely ICU demand due to COVID-19 based on experience in Italy and the UK (previous planning estimates assumed half the demand now estimated) and with the NHS providing increasing certainty around the limits of hospital surge capacity.
We therefore conclude that epidemic suppression is the only viable strategy at the current time. The social and economic effects of the measures which are needed to achieve this policy goal will be profound. Many countries have adopted such measures already, but even those countries at an earlier stage of their epidemic (such as the UK) will need to do so imminently
US airlines go through Chapter 11 - bankruptcy/creditor protection - while some of the planes keep flying. During the last decade, only two airlines though emerged from the process in some OK shape or form:
Through the 90s and 00s, Delta, United and AA emerged OK after filing for Chapter 11:
The UK Scheme of Arrangement under the English law allows for similar cases, at least on paper it can work, to make sure operations continue as normal.
However, currently there is almost no business as people aren’t flying, so they can’t segregate the day-to-day ops from the balance sheet reorganisation.
So, when you’re stuck with a choice between investing/building and buying ventilators, supporting millions of people, and bailing out Virgin Atlantic which employs 10,000s, what do you do before May 2020?
In addition to airline workers, there’re already a bunch of coders getting laid off right now, not to mention blue collar workers.