Livestock Trading Thread: Baa or better

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Business, Finance, and Careers > Livestock Trading Thread: Baa or better

waffle: May 12, 2001; HEH

I'm confused as to why the markets always drop after news or speculation about news like this. Isn't this good news, a vote of confidence in an improving economy, in the end?

# ¿ Feb 19, 2010 05:02

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# ¿ May 4, 2024 14:45

waffle: May 12, 2001; HEH

I WANT TO EAT BABBY posted:

I liked it better when people didn't talk about penny stocks.

Yeah this thread went a weird "get rich quick" scheme direction

# ¿ Mar 13, 2010 03:50

waffle: May 12, 2001; HEH

I dunno. VZ was attractive to me last year, and nothing seems to be better (in fact, their situation seems worse nowadays, and I don't think them getting the iPhone would be nearly as impactful nowadays), and it's only gone down, down, down since then. I have no idea why, though... I'm just glad I never bought any of it.

waffle fucked around with this message at 21:55 on Apr 24, 2010

# ¿ Apr 24, 2010 21:48

waffle: May 12, 2001; HEH

greasyhands posted:

Be really careful guys, this is a very short term but severe disruption and it will be very difficult to trade this market correctly over the next month or two. We know what the virus is at this point, its no longer a mysterious unknown. You can argue whatever you want about �well china shut everyone down� �well south korea tested more� but it really doesn�t matter because its basically stopped spreading in both places. It is following a very typical viral outbreak curve. Yes, it might yoyo a bit, but this isn�t apocalyptic. The only real question now is just how incompetent is the trump admin? Just how poorly can you possibly handle this disruption? Just don�t buy cruise lines and you�ll be ok.

The health effects of the disease won't be apocalyptic but I don't know that the market has really grappled with just how long travel restrictions/store/work/school closures will have to be to effectively slow spread enough that health systems can cope. I guess it depends on how long you consider "very short term" but there's no way interventions that people are putting into place now can be lifted before summer. But yes, be careful because the market uncertainty over the next couple months is going to be insane, simply because of those unknown effects on the global economy.

waffle fucked around with this message at 12:49 on Mar 16, 2020

# ¿ Mar 16, 2020 12:47

waffle: May 12, 2001; HEH

greasyhands posted:

This is bottom-ish right here, and we�ll be past corona panic in about a month. Mark it, dude. VIX headed down despite the market making GBS threads. Oil at $25, it will not get cheaper for anything more than a panic day or two. We�re there, boys. Buy some KSS, jesus christ it hasnt been this cheap since the 90s

Possible that the market is nearing its bottom but there is no way the school/restaurant closures/self isolation recommendations end within a month (less versed in the economic impact, but am epidemiologist. absolutely no way all the interventions are lifted in a month and the economy returns to normal by then. Italy is showing it takes at least a couple weeks for cases to level off after you start--and the US hasn't started yet, not really--and even once it levels off you can't stop for a while). Because of that I don't see any major recovery happening for at least a couple months so I would advise caution on jumping on it now.

# ¿ Mar 18, 2020 15:28

waffle: May 12, 2001; HEH

greasyhands posted:

You are 100% already wrong. S. Korea established the real mortality rate with their thorough testing (i believe s korea is at about 0.6% mortality). China is already mostly past it. Its a severe cold, it isn’t what you perversely hope it to be. It will of course linger for a long time (maybe permanently, it may just be another of 100s of coronaviruses that are just part of our lives) but people are going to move on very quickly once the panic subsides

My dude South Korea's numbers are low because there are still a lot of infected people who may still die, and because they're catching an unusually high number of asymptomatics cause their testing regime is so good. In fact the current as of today death rate in SK is .9%, which is still about 10x as deadly as an especially bad flu season, and there are still lots of hospitalizations in the future

waffle fucked around with this message at 15:42 on Mar 18, 2020

# ¿ Mar 18, 2020 15:39

waffle: May 12, 2001; HEH

greasyhands posted:

Ok we have different opinions thus we have a market. The death rate at the end of this will absolutely be lower than what we are showing now due to obvious testing bias for a virus that most people cant tell apart from a cold symptomatically. We may never know how many people actually get infected given how many people are completely asymptomatic. Of course old dying people get tested while everyone else gets tested at some ludicrously low rate. The data is already showing itself, public officials are just being overly cautious in their analysis which is the *correct* approach

It's really not an "opinion" though, there are lots of statisticians and epidemiologists accounting for those exact factors, and here's two studies: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.04.20031104v1 that found a 1.3% fatality rate accounting for asymptomatics and testing in China, and another: https://cmmid.github.io/topics/covid19/severity/diamond_cruise_cfr_estimates.html that found a mortality rate of 2.3% from data from the Diamond Princess after accounting for the age distribution of passengers on the ship. There are real reasons to think the market is overreacting but if your basis for thinking that is "COVID-19 isn't that bad, actually", there's a lot of (scientific) evidence against that.

China has stopped it and Italy is in the process of stopping it, so it definitely can be stopped, but neither country is anywhere close to ending the interventions that led to stopping it (which will have continued economic impact after the last few
cases)... if they do, they'll risk reintroduction and new epidemics (so they likely won't)

waffle fucked around with this message at 15:50 on Mar 18, 2020

# ¿ Mar 18, 2020 15:48

waffle: May 12, 2001; HEH

greasyhands posted:

A calculated mortality rate for a disease based on a few dozen cases on a ship in an extremely stressful environment (forcibly quarantined at sea in a tiny cruise ship cabin)? You loving kidding me?

dude cruise passengers are *healthier* on average than their non-cruising counterparts, because they are on a cruise. you are extremely talking out your rear end at the moment. and if you like here's a 3rd one https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.09.20033357v1 that calculates the CFR as 1.38%.

back to the thread topic, there are other reasons to think the market has overreacted--a huge stimulus bill blunts a lot of negative economic effects, but "everyone is overestimating the potential severity of COVID-19" ain't one

waffle fucked around with this message at 16:00 on Mar 18, 2020

# ¿ Mar 18, 2020 15:51

waffle: May 12, 2001; HEH

greasyhands posted:

Heres the thing... it doesnt really matter if its 0.6%, 0.9%, or 1.2% (it will not be 2%+, github study notwithstanding) none of those numbers are good nor are any of them catastrophic. Its just a possible range. Im of the the belief that a ton of people are being missed in the current testing (confirmed asymptomatic patients makes this an almost certainty) and the disease is far more contagious than originally thought (viral loads are extremely high) but also far less lethal than feared by the fearmongers. There is room for disagreement there, we do not know for sure yet. What we do know is in places that it started, its already on the way out. It didnt wipe out any significant number of the population. It didnt knock entire populations on their rear end for weeks- most people get over it in a weekend! Yes, it took drastic measures in a couple of places but it absolutely was not a disaster in the end. China is already back on its feet. Theres a lot of evidence that reinfection is unlikely. Every single sign points to �were gonna move past this pretty quickly�.

The interventions are working, we can agree that it's not going to infect 70% of the world or anything even close (maybe eventually but not this year). But I would caution on thinking China is back on its feet now--they are in terms of health effects, but they are still on lockdown and people in Hubei province are still quarantined in their homes, and so the economic effects are still happening... which is what's going to happen across EU/NA. People will get it under control but the economic effects will keep going because it's not like we can go immediately back to normal the day we get <10 cases a day.

waffle fucked around with this message at 16:16 on Mar 18, 2020

# ¿ Mar 18, 2020 16:11

waffle: May 12, 2001; HEH

enraged_camel posted:

So why has the market been relatively flat yesterday and today? Seems a bit weird, since things are getting worse and worse.

Ain't in the news in a real way that's different from earlier in the week (yet) though

# ¿ Mar 20, 2020 18:26

waffle: May 12, 2001; HEH

I think the health and economic effects of the pandemic get conflated somewhat. I certainly think a lot of state governments are taking the disease appropriately seriously that they'll avoid a lot of deaths which is really good and reason for optimism, but the specific measures they have to take are going to have the largest economic effects, and most of them have yet to be put in place. They'll have to be put in place for a while, too. Italy has far from stopped their increase--They had 3500 new cases for 3-4 days but the last 3 days have recorded 4200, 5300, and 5900 new cases respectively. Their measures have definitely slowed the increase but they are still looking at a doubling time of ~6-7 days (way better than the 2-3 the US has, but they're far from out of the woods)... There's no way their lockdown measures can end within the next month or two, and they'll have to be in place similarly long in some places in the USA.

That said, surely some industries/companies have likely been hit too hard through the initial reaction so there are bargains out there, but my point is avoiding the worst-case scenario in humanitarian terms (which I agree we have a good chance of doing) still makes it fairly likely the economic effects are really only just starting to be felt. With the right bill and new potential therapies I could see a summer recovery as well, but on that I have way less faith in Trump and Congress

waffle fucked around with this message at 11:11 on Mar 21, 2020

# ¿ Mar 21, 2020 09:00

waffle: May 12, 2001; HEH

TheKevman posted:

Looking back on this now, I'm not so certain the SF Bay Area/my hotel hasn't gone through it already. After Christmas, we had a massive wave of people calling off over about 2-3 weeks. Most people missed about 3-4 days, or took off enough time to carry them through a weekend. This was generally referred to as a "really bad cold that's going around." A number of my immediate coworkers presented with symptoms such as: dry cough, sore throat, slight temp.

I had this, but not nearly as severely as my wife, who had a nasty, unproductive chest cough for about 2 solid weeks. The first few days she had it she felt awful, but she's stubborn as poo poo and refused to go to the doctors, so I loaded her up on fluids, made her chicken pho etc. After a few days of being lethargic, she bounced back pretty well but had a lingering cough.

My symptoms were itchy/sore throat, slight cough (not much, lasted about a week) and I may or may not have run a temp, that I can't speak to. I've had the flu before so I know the aches that are associated with it, and I didn't get anything remotely close to that.

My parents both had similar symptoms as well. My dad, who has like 4/6 risks factors, had a nasty, awful 'cold' for about 2.5 weeks, and at one point it was so severe that my mom was trying to take him to the ER but he wouldn't budge, mostly because he has a hard time getting around. 2 weeks of dry cough, followed by what he described as 'the most productive few days of coughing I'd ever had.' He had bacterial pneumonia 6 or so years ago when he was in better health and it almost killed him, and he said that at its worst it reminded him of it, but not AS severe. Should have gone to the doctors, but he's a wannabe Clint Eastwood.

My mom, who has one of the toughest immune systems I've ever seen and has about 2,000 hours of sick time accrued (I'm not even kidding, she has something like 8 or 9 months at last tally) took 5 days plus a weekend off to recover and was the worst I'd ever heard her. Nasty, dry cough, don't think she ran a temp, but DID go to the doctors, and they said 'there's a really bad cold or something going around." I ran gallons of the broth to them as well.

Baseless speculation, to be sure, but the timeline fits if we accept that the Dec. 31 case wasn't the very first case and that as some reports from SCMP and others have pointed to the potential of it starting closer to November, it's possible it's been here and has run through quite a few of us already.

It may not have been the first case in China but genotyping analyses of coronavirus circulating around the USA suggest there wasn't an early, unseen introduction there, though there was community transmission before people realized. There is a baseline level of mutation and if coronavirus had been circulating that long, you'd have a lot more variation within ongoing clusters than you see now. The flu that was circulating around was a little nastier than usual, though.

# ¿ Mar 21, 2020 11:37

waffle: May 12, 2001; HEH

pmchem posted:

Yes, there is lots of good evidence that, when the health system is fully functioning, government is responding to the virus, and hospitals are not overwhelmed, the across-all-ages fatality rate is in that 0.3-1.0% range.

The problem we currently face is that, if people do not practice social distancing or drastically shut down activity where there are active outbreaks, then hospitals WILL be overwhelmed and fatality rates will go up due to lack of beds, ventilators, etc. That's exactly what Boris Johnson had initially planned to do in the UK -- let it rapidly spread, develop 'herd immunity', and so on -- until he got his head out of his rear end and changed plans.

If people across the US don't take this seriously enough, then there will be a whole lot of preventable deaths and horrible hospital iphone videos, hence rational investing responses such as:

I hope we keep the fatality rate in the 0.3-1.0% range.

I wish I had been more aggressive in getting my parents allocated away from stocks (or otherwise hedged) weeks ago, like how I treated my own investments. They're getting bad advice from an overpriced financial advisor. Baddog's been right about this all along and wish I had closely followed this thread earlier.

The only caution here is it's an apples-to-oranges comparison to compare case numbers with IFR. IFR includes the asymptomatics that the US' current testing regime will not catch and isn't designed to catch. So when you see the case numbers out there now, and the ones in the coming weeks, using IFR won't be a useful value for predicting the numbers of deaths you'll see in a couple weeks time.

Others here have talked about the asymptomatics being important because it means maybe way more people have had it than we think, so that maybe it won't spread as much as we think because of herd immunity... but the problem is herd immunity will really only protect people from getting infected if over 50% of the population get the disease... and about 80% of cases are expected to have herd immunity. So, the case where we rely on that is still a pretty worst case scenario, since that would still be ~35M getting it and being symptomatic (50% of the US * 20% being symptomatic). The interventions will blunt this significantly but again, they ain't gonna be short-term interventions

# ¿ Mar 21, 2020 13:48

waffle: May 12, 2001; HEH

Cheesemaster200 posted:

How do we know that 20% will be symptomatic? If we are only testing symptomatic people and 10-20x have the virus than are otherwise testing, then only 5-10% would be symptomatic. Then, of those 5-10% of people who are symptomatic you have a 0.3-1.0% mortality rate. Then, of that mortality rate how many of theme would have died if they were infected with any other regularly circulating disease? According to the CDC, each year 160k people die of chronic respiratory disease and 55k people die of flu. Do you attribute the death of a 86-year old with emphysema to coronavirus or "chronic lower respiratory disease"?

The severity of this whole pandemic is based upon whatever numbers someone wants to pull out of their rear end. Its a very uncertain situation, so this is to be somewhat expected. However our leaders are making decisions which will have long lasting effects on generations of the population based upon these numbers. I really wish someone would make a concerted effort to get hard data on the full extent of infections. Given how we are spending trillions to manage to fallout of the economic effects of these decisions, I don't find it too much to ask to focus some resources on this.

Studies have approached estimating the asymptomatic reservoirs in totally different ways, and it is partly possible because IFR and CFR are related in a pretty straightforward way; CFR is deaths / symptomatics, while IFR is deaths / (asymptomatics + symptomatics): statistical modeling (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.09.20033357v1.full.pdf predicts roughly 60% asymptomatic), epidemiological modeling (https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0383/9/2/523/htm predicts roughly 80% asymptomatic, and https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/03/13/science.abb3221 roughly 66% asymptomatic).

The other things are pretty established issues in medicine--it's not like this is the first time doctors and epidemiologists have had to ask "How do you attribute deaths to a disease when someone has had another complicating condition?", and the way they do it is going to be comparable across diseases (but, comparing IFR in COVID-19 with CFR for seasonal flu isn't a reasonable comparison--the denominators are different; in this case, you are talking more about 1-2.5% CFR in COVID-19 against .05 - .1% CFR for flu, which really does justify some pretty significant interventions even if there's significant economic impact) It's not pulling numbers out of your rear end even if there is uncertainty around it based on lacking data. It would be great to have more data but there's actually a lot out there now, and the rapid spread of the disease means you gotta work with what you got

Anyway, to get back to the stocks there is uncertainty in how the markets will respond to the months of lockdown/school/shop closures that we'll see almost certainly (maybe those months are already priced in) but the governments are starting to do what they should be doing against a pretty serious (but not apocalyptic) disease. There's just a worrying amount of trying to unskew numbers that a lot of skilled epidemiologists have calculated (and come up with strikingly similar numbers across independent studies) that seems a lot like wishful thinking.

VV thanks greaseman

waffle fucked around with this message at 19:00 on Mar 21, 2020

# ¿ Mar 21, 2020 18:41

waffle: May 12, 2001; HEH

Lemming posted:

And for all the talk of things being priced in, we aren't seeing widespread deaths yet. There's no universe where that doesn't make people more scared, bullshit everyone reacts like "oh yeah we knew thousands and thousands of people would be dead, stay the course"

This is basically where I am. The right things are starting to happen to prevent the worst case scenario but there's still a good amount of health-related and economic pain ahead that isn't yet fully grasped by most investors. That said if I had to bet right now, I think there's a decent chance it'll be a V-shaped downturn, but we're just not that close to the bottom of the V yet--bad things will hit in the near term and keep things dropping, but as cases slow and health systems start to recover some months from now, people and investors will look for positive things to hang onto and the market will rebound accordingly.

# ¿ Mar 21, 2020 21:47

waffle: May 12, 2001; HEH

I'm down at S&P 1900 and oil 18.50

# ¿ Mar 22, 2020 11:12

waffle: May 12, 2001; HEH

Sepist posted:

Itll be interesting to see the environmental improvement a few months of global shut down cause. I dont think much, but it will be a fascinating study.

Also lol @ that 2020 prediction. She got the year right (which is unfair because 2020 is a good sounding year to predict poo poo) but totally missed on it being untreatable and it sure as poo poo wont disappear. They shouldn't even entertain that kind of fear mongering

One risk for oil companies and oil-related industries is if governments use this as an opportunity to jump start green alternatives when things start ramping back up. (but they probably won't, at least as much as they should)

# ¿ Mar 22, 2020 15:05

waffle: May 12, 2001; HEH

Freezer posted:

We're still missing the third act of the crisis, when covid blows up in developing nations (think Brazil, Mexico, India, etc) with limited healthcare capabilities and without the ability to conjure 4 trillion dollars out of thin air because their currencies are already shot to poo poo. It could get really bad and force borders to stay closed for months, supply chains hosed and demand vastly reduced.

What I'm saying is be careful when trying to catch this particular knife.

Yeah, this is another significant global risk in the medium term. People have been hoping there's a temperature-dependent effect of transmission but the evidence there is basically just hopes and dreams. And it's starting to pick up across Africa:

# ¿ Mar 22, 2020 16:21

waffle: May 12, 2001; HEH

Christ the market is Insane.

greasyhands posted:

My opinion is hibernate now, but thats pretty hard to do for a degenerate gambler... the market we have to look forward to over the next 6 months at least is probably death by 1000 cuts. Depends on what your goals are i guess.

Yep I think it's gonna be hard to predict what's gonna happen over the next few months on a stock by stock basis. I would very strongly bet on a general trend down but boy that can be a real rollercoaster on the way (see: today and yesterday)

# ¿ Mar 25, 2020 20:10

waffle: May 12, 2001; HEH

Baddog posted:

Good point on the data, any data is good, just have to understand the limitations.

Even a test with a five percent rate of false positives - it's better to roll that out than just flying blind. Especially on a macro level it would give us an idea of spread.

It really isn't when you don't have a sense of specificity/sensitivity of a given test (and EXTRMELY NOTABLY this is not known in the test Cuomo talks about!!) when the disease is likely still fairly rare (and <5% is rare). Example: Your test has false positives only 2.5% of the time, and it catches positives 100% of the time. Only .1% of the population is actually infected. This means the percentage positive you'd get from this is .001 + .025 * .999, or 2.59%, a 259x overestimation. Epi Twitter is not very happy with what Cuomo is talking about, I will tell you that.

Edit: Lol, I found some stats for this test:
https://twitter.com/RidleyDM/status/1253378245430517760

waffle fucked around with this message at 20:19 on Apr 23, 2020

# ¿ Apr 23, 2020 20:15

waffle: May 12, 2001; HEH

LLCoolJD posted:

A quick Google search indicates a requirement of typically between 83% and 94% to get herd immunity. Great.

I can't see us shutting everything down for months on end. At some point we're going to have to put masks on and get back to work. I don't like the prospects for a significant number of businesses, though (restaurants, theaters, air travel, hotels...).

I think what we'll find is that there are intermediate measures that can keep the rate of new cases pretty low. We can probably expand the definition of "essential services" to allow some back to work, schools maybe--it's an iffy one cause they're pretty essential for the larger economy, and kids are low risk, but also, they're real germ machines. But the service industries you mention seem like the most obvious ones to keep shut. What this exactly means for the economy, who knows, but I suppose that's why it's swinging wildly even within the same day at the moment.

waffle fucked around with this message at 22:12 on Apr 23, 2020

# ¿ Apr 23, 2020 22:09

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# ¿ May 4, 2024 14:45

waffle: May 12, 2001; HEH

Baddog posted:

You should be able to measure the specificity of the test fairly well though. Maybe they are having trouble finding known negative cases haha.

edit - nah, they should have plenty of 2019 blood samples to use. So I feel like they *should* be able to know pretty accurately what their false positive rate is.

Yeah, they certainly can (though it takes time and effort), but they haven't for the test used in NY yet. So the numbers are pretty suspect for now

# ¿ Apr 23, 2020 22:12

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Business, Finance, and Careers > Livestock Trading Thread: Baa or better