3 ms·
Medical officials selling in March 2020 makes, um, sense? The pandemic's potential for destruction was massively clear to medical-professionals by mid-February
by ISL 4y ago
Medical officials selling in March 2020 makes, um, sense? The pandemic's potential for destruction was massively clear to medical-professionals by mid-February.
It is easy to believe that those making the trades were acting primarily on information known widely to the public.
Washington State announced its first deaths in late February [1]
It isn't that hard to put two and two together and expect that at least a fraction of skilled medical professionals will react.
I'm a physicist and I was still able to recognize by late Feb/early March that we were headed for trouble. Similarly, just before the Federal government stepped in with stimulus in late March/early-April 2020, as a value-investor, I'd just begun to feel that the markets had fallen enough to begin buying equities again after a multi-year hiatus.
Trading on both signals (imminent pandemic, increasingly-reasonable trailing P/E ratios) will look "exquisite", but required nothing but reading the news and making sober assessments of both situations.
One may also be able to look at the same trading data and find officials who made exquisitely-terrible trades, especially after late-March 2020, where volatile markets created outsized losers and winners.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Washington_(state) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Washingto...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Zanneth 4y agoThe problem was that these medical officials were complicit in the economic destruction. They recommended to policymakers that the country take an extreme position on the virus and shutdown nearly everything. Hindsight is 20/20 of course, but now it is becoming clear that such an extreme reaction was not necessary, especially when comparing with countries like Sweden who focused on protecting the elderly and vulnerable and more or less left everyone else alone. So, they made a mistake, and the fact that they also profited from that mistake is where we should be worried.