A COVID Diary: Searching for Investment Serenity

Abstract

In early February of 2020, when US equities were hitting all-time highs and the US economy was showing strength, a virus, that many believed would be isolated to China and cruise ships, surged into the rest of the world. The resulting economic shut down put stocks into a tailspin, starting the COVID crisis clock. In the days after the meltdown started, I kept a journal chronicling market events and trying to make sense of them, partly to recover my investing balance, and partly to keep a record of my uncertainties and fears, in real time. That journal became the basis for fourteen posts on the crisis, with the first one on February 26, 2020, just a couple of weeks after it started, and the last one on November 5, 2020, as the first vaccines were being readied for approval. In this paper, I use those posts to look at how the crisis played out in markets and across companies, and I use the winners and losers to make judgments about post-crisis lessons for companies and investors.