Slow day here + hot topic ... what do you think of the coronavirus threat? Are you ignorantly assuming the flu is not so bad so this must be too? Are you stockpiling 12 years of toilet paper because you mistyped the units on Amazon? Do you live in your car in Seattle and are self quarantined in your Fit? Let us know!

(It is a serious topic, honestly, I just like to maintain a sense of humor in the face of disaster)

 

lmao. Fair question. Since it's the start of the trees exacting revenge via their pollen spores, i'm self quarantined anyway. I imagine given the CDC notes about symptoms being generally mild I'll unwittingly catch and spread the virus at some point in the near future. The highest risk of serious complications goes to the elderly, infirm, and babies. Of course if I do show signs that i've contracted it, i'll go see a clinic for testing.

Honestly, i just wish people didn't buy all the toilet paper at my local walmart, because now i have to order it online.

 

I remember the swine flu and I don't remember this level of hysteria. My old coworker was told TC until further notice since his building had a medical event (they're not saying it was corona, but just being cautious). We just got word from management to telecommute 2-3 days a week. I asked which days corona will be at work so I can stay home those days and all I got was crickets. I thought it was kind of silly. Either tell me to TC the whole time or not at all.

I'm prepared like I normally am for hurricanes/snowstorms. I usually have 2 big cases of water, canned foods and a well stocked fridge and chest freezer. We do a lot of cooking at home anyways so our pantry is well situated. We keep a few thousand in cash in case there is a run on a bank. Only thing difference was I told my wife to keep the van at least half tank at all times in case of gas shortage.

I've never got the flu shot, neither have my wife and 2 kids under 4. People die every year of the flu and some of them die even after getting the shot. Seems like a roll of the dice but if you think it'll help you then more power to ya. The flu shot is reformulated every year so it's a guessing game that it'll even be effective with what ever strain is hitting.

My retirement and brokerage account have taken nice hits but I'm 40 years old so I've got lots of time for that to recover. I'm trading in my bonds for sp500/dj indexes though and trying to buy equities at a discounted price. Just today I bought Disney stock at $105 a share when before corona it was at $145-150. After Corona blows over, I fully expect Disney to go back up as there will be pent up demand for the theme parks. Plus their streaming service has been doing well.

 

Nice prep for contingencies there! I like it.

I do think the people hoarding tp are going a bit overboard. I can’t see that the us supply chain for tp is going to suddenly dry up catastrophically. Or beans. Do Americans even like beans? I’m pretty sure no, yet the shelves are empty at the supermarket.

I’m sure there is going to be some resource misallocation - medical supplies are stocked on a last minute basis and that’s a concern. Spray cleaner? Paper towels? Maybe. But tp is stocked everywhere, and the overall consumption of tp is unlikely to increase by a large amount (let’s just say demand is driven by a fairly predictable and periodic household event).

I’m a former investments guy - not old now just on to something else in career - and I can predict with confidence that I can’t predict where the market is going. But my bet is continued down until it looks like US cases are starting to decelerate. Disney stock has been punished and I think the demand for reopened parks, plus signs for streaming, make it a smart buy.

cheers!

 

Obviously our "prep" could always be better, but I'm not going out bunker shopping or anything. I prefer to prepare for disasters that are more likely, versus black swan events. I had to laugh at the bean thing as I've had the same bag 1lb bag of 7 bean soup for a number of years. It's something that never really goes "bad". We eat a lot of rice, so I typically have at least 20-40lbs of rice in a container in the kitchen. Rice can stretch a lot of meals. My wife bakes bread so we typically have 20-30lbs of flour in the house. You can freeze flour so we have some in zip lock bags that we take out when we need them.

We didn't go crazy with the cleaners. I told my wife to make sure we had some bleach and vinegar. It's surprising how effective those two are as a cleanser when diluted.

On the investment stuff, I look long term. I've been investing in retirement accounts for about 17 years. I've seen the market go up and down and I just keep plugging money into my retirement accounts through dollar cost averaging. Even with the dips, the balance continues to grow and grow. I've had years where I made almost 30% return, and I've had years in the negative. 60-70% of the time the market is positive for the year, and my spreadsheets (Yes I'm a spreadsheet nerd. Do you want to see my gas tracking one lol?) are showing it. I only got into really tracking my balance sheet recently so I only have the last 10 years tracked, but 6 of those years my accounts were positive. The 4 that were negative (including this year so far), least negative was -.49% and this year so far is -16.8%. SP is -21% so I'm not doing too badly haha

I've only had a brokerage account for 3 years and even with this year's big lost so far, it's still more than what I've ever put into it. Last year I made 37%. So this year's YTD "lost" of -17.57% while sucky to look at, doesn't make me feel too bad as I've been buying indexes and stocks at a discount. I may buy Visa next as it's about $54 from it's peak in Feb 19, so about a 25% discount. Anybody really think Visa is going out of business?

What kind of investment stuff did you do? Why'd you get out?

 

I pretty much follow heavily on the PBS news programs. Also their world news program. I saw this following report yesterday and it wasn't very enlightening on how the US has responded to this virus. The world health organizations were pretty much all in agreement with testing procedures and how to go about it dealing with it. All except the US. They bowed out of the agreed upon methods and said they will do it their way. Their way has been pretty much a disaster and we've haven't even reached the pinnacle yet.

U.S. federal response to coronavirus a ‘fiasco,’ says global health expert

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/u-...-health-expert

 

MIT's 3rd story today -

US coronavirus testing is slowly ramping up, but way too late

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/6...-way-too-late/

 

The number of deaths so far is a fraction of what we get every year with the flu, and while the federal response could definitely have been better, the travel bans seem to have been a good idea. There's no way to accurately quantify how many cases/deaths there would have been without them, but the rate of spread here seems to be a lot better than Italy and Spain.

Caution is a good thing, panic is not. The one good thing for me so far is that I'm not having to hike through the woods and roust bums out of their camps, it's considered a higher risk environment with the virus for essentially a lecture about trespassing and no actual arrests.

A few months from now, it will start to turn into a vague memory in the minds of most Americans, like swine flu, bird flu, SARS, etc.

 

t’s good to not panic, good to be cautious.

The rate of spread is not low. The rate of testing is low, because the cdc dramatically dropped the ball - MA has like a 20:1 presumptive (102f+cough) vs tested because there aren’t enough kits to go around. The virus is popping up “randomly” because it’s very easy to be mildly sick with this one and travel around.

the uk has an interesting strategy. They want people to get infected so there’s “herd immunity” that will slow the spread in the fall, Vs stamp it out and have it rush back up in November when the health services are flush with flu patients. It’s an interesting .. and risky.. gambit. I have to give them credit for being innovative.

As to the question why I got out of investments. In 2008 I saw a lot of good people get fired through no fault of theirs except bad luck. Didn’t want that to be me ten years later when I had s kid. It’s a good field but the stress level can be high. Now, I do product design for auto insurance. Anyway, I’m not a terribly good investor; a much better saver (... then just buy a bit of everything)!

 

Yes, so far is a fraction of the deaths, but you know what? I beat you the Hanks family is not looking to make a quick exit from Australia! And the "sealing" of the boarder from parts of Europe was late and was a pretty inept way to deal with this issue. That should have been part of a broader response, but now just looks like a couple of notches above doing nothing. Pretty much anyone really wanting to, can travel from Italy, to the UK, to the US, and have no problem. The one thing holding them up would be leaving Italy, and it wouldn't be entering the US.

The thing is it still hasn't been resolved this testing capacity shortage. It's been 7 weeks since the first case was announced here in the US. 7 weeks and we're still not where we should be. I guess we can follow Trump's view on it. No news is good news and soon this will all blow away with warmer weather. And that will be attributed to luck or genus president's ability of governing?

I'm really curious to read up on how we, the country that has the best blah blah blah, and the best blah blah blah, I'm wondering how we managed to get down to a 3rd world state.

AP - https://apnews.com/76b0f255426ad655a26e927062e1fef9

 

The US could have purchased WHO testing kits, made by a German manufacturer, headquartered here in America. We still could. We haven’t.

meanwhile jack ma has just donated like 1m test kits to be shipped across the US through his charity. Thank you! They don’t seem to be coming from anywhere else. (I assumed this was fake news, obviously .. but it seems not).

 

Yeah I bet there was a reduction of staff during that time frame, and maybe there will be another one soon? Investors can get funny as soon as they see money going in the wrong direction. Most people think they are aggressive investors until they lose money. My wife is a new investor starting this year. She's dismayed that she's lost a few thousand already and I told her, just be glad you're learning this lesson after losing a few thousand dollars. If you do this long enough you might see losing tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands one day during bears and corrections.

As for my update, we've been told we can telecommute 5 days a week since we've had two people who are confirmed cases in separate sites. I'm going to stick to 3 for now as I'm at a smaller satellite site. I've still been investing with yesterday's purchase of Disney at $85. May do another round of rebalance from bonds into SP500 in my retirement accounts.

 

Well, the coronavirus is directly affecting my Fit, in that I decided yesterday to leave the winter tires on this summer instead of paying to have the all seasons mounted on the wheels.

Here in Boston area, we’re down to only essential travel (or nearly - we are not in “lockdown” but many stores and all recreational venues are closed.) So there’s really no place to go except groceries, takeout or medical visits.

I figure we’re in that status for AT LEAST two months. More if a effective treatment takes longer. Vacation in NH in June off the table. Figure in practical terms that means two-mile radius trips and maybe as few as 500 miles this summer. I kinda would prefer to have all seasons and I was just about to go get it done, but besides cost, the tire manager told me their technicians are from a communal work/study/rehab program and they can no longer leave the group house ... so they have two managers and no workers at the shop!

Have kicked myself many times for not buying a 2nd wheel set. Certainly can’t mount tires on rims and balance myself ...

 

I'm up for state safety inspection next month and my tires are close to needing to be replaced. Last time I measured them they were 3/32-4/32 so hopefully the places are still open. On Wednesday I was off so I took the minivan to get safety inspected. I have till the end of the month, but I was off and I didn't want my wife doing it with the kids in tow. I had to go to 5 garages to get the inspection done. First couldn't get me the car till 2pm (I arrived at 830am), 2nd not till 5pm, 3rd the inspector didn't show up, 4th they were too busy to fit it in, the 5th finally said they could do it right then and there. Took them 30m to have it done. Might go there to get the Fit inspected in a few weeks.

While I was running around I figured I'd hit the grocery stores to replenish my provisions I used up this week. Walmart and Lidl had most things but some items were just gone. Both had TP but small 6packs limit of 2.

My vacation this year is probably postponed as well. We like to go to the OBX, but was notified no outside visitors other than residents or workers.

Can you order a second set of wheels/tires mounted and then drop ship to you? Like from TireRack?

 

I just bought a tire balancing machine, $900 without the delivery charge. Put some Pirellis on the wife's car and saved probably $100 over Discount Tire. Wife said it was a stupid waste of money, but it should pay for itself in eight more sets of tires. And we've gone through more than ten sets of tires between several cars in the time we've been together, so that's not an empty promise.

Used to have a bubble level style balancer that worked pretty well, but one of the kids damaged it somehow and it was time to get a real one. I'm not recommending that anyone else start changing their own tires, but just in case there's some interest, this is the model I got. Mounting the tires is actually pretty easy with hand tools.

https://www.gregsmithequipment.com/A...Wheel-Balancer

Need to put new tires on the Fit at the end of the year, and either a new set of snow tires on the spare wheels, or some snow rated all seasons on the truck, so I feel pretty good about this purchase.

Edit- too bad I'm on the other side of the country from you guys, or I could offer some assistance in getting the summer tires back on.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ch7_...g#action=share

He felt this was a pandemic long before this was a pandemic.

 

He also asked not to count too quickly so the numbers wouldn’t look bad. He’s finally doing an ok job now that the fear of looking like a moron has kicked in, but he needn’t worry about that, his moron evaluation was completed long ago.

You know how I’ve been fretting I can’t find time to take apart the engine to do valves? Well ... seeing as we aren’t going out much ...

 

You guys might find this interesting, found it in a discussion of why people are buying so much toilet paper, but the article goes way deeper than that.

https://zeihan.com/the-geopolitics-of-american-fear/

 

Have y’all seen the map!?!

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html

 

If I had space I would acquire one of these. I need to put tires on my S2000 wheels and I have both....but I'm not going to a tire shop during a pandemic when I have another functional car I could use.