I assure you I am not talking about the aggressive curve-fitting community. Just...normal people. Nobody famous, not even any Chinese nationals. Just...fairly normal, if tech-worker-y, Americans and Europeans.
By and large, both the general public and organizations were caught by surprise. If most people knew, the stocks would have tanked in January, not these past few days.
Which brings an interesting question: how many of all the people you know who knew, yourself included, put their skin in the game and are now rich from the options they bought in January? If it is not many, I would argue it is better to say people suspected or feared, not that they knew.
It's a real big stretch from "certain enough to take personal precautions" to "is a stock head and wants to throw down puts". You get that normal people don't really give a damn about the stock market, yeah? Put a gun to my head and I can't tell you how a put works and I don't really care--I'm too busy buying a house.
I did, however, rebalance almost entirely out of stocks three weeks ago and while I am not "now rich", my portfolio is doing a hell of a lot better than most folks'.
+1 to this. I'd been worrying since mid-late January, and aggressively telling people since early February that this was going to be bad... but even a week ago, tons of people that I talked to were thinking that this was such an overreaction and would blow over. Just couldn't believe it, even after seeing how it went in Italy, a majority of people said the US would never have that problem.
I didn't even know that a "put" on the stock market was a thing until last week, and am not particularly interested in figuring out how to do that... But I did back out of buying a car because I thought I'd be better off to have the cash when this gets bad, and here we are now in this thread... Maybe next time (hopefully there isn't one) I'll figure out more of what a "put" actually is and how to get one
Out of curiosity, do you have any plan when and why to go back in stocks? I'm currently 20% stocks (ETFs really), 5% bonds, 75% cash. I only plan to continue buying stocks and bonds every month, as usual (so, DCA).
50% tends to be near enough the bottom for these kinds of things that that's when I'll rebalance my retirement fund. I'm going to keep my brokerage out longer as I have shorter-term needs for that money.
I pretty much agree with you on this, my wife is a Doctor so I got to overhear a lot of calls where the CDC and the local Doctors/Hospitals and none of them saw this as obviously exploding into a pandemic. Rather they made decisions as it progressed.
That being said, I did take what I felt was a risk at the time and shorted Royal Caribbean and Carnival Cruise lines which payed off, but I was not certain that at the time it would (if I was I would have risked a whole lot more), I went off a hunch once I started seeing them close the ports to cruise ships. I am now buying those stocks because I think their hit from CORVID-19 is priced in, but we will see. It's all a guessing game on good hunches. Hardly anybody saw it exploding (short of the doctors on the ground in Wuhan) and everyone was hoping that it was going to be contained in China just like SARS was.
The reality is, Doctors and the CDC do not make decisions on news reports they make them on papers and data from people on the ground. That data was actively being suppressed to some extent by China until it was too late. Sure there where rouge Chinese doctors in the media warning us (and they where right), but that is a thin straw to base policy on. Once the true data was out and the CDC could base guideline on it, it was already too late.
Also to note I am sorry and pray for those of you that are affected by this.
