Markets not Live: In Which Bryce Makes a Segue So Smooth You'll Miss It If You Blink (plus Covid-19)

From FT Alphaville:

started doing this, the “Markets not live” branding was just a handy way to harvest searches for the legacy service. It now feels more like a portent.

That’s a 2 per cent gain for the FTSE 100 in the three month hiatus between ML and MnL, and a 5.4 per cent drop since. You’re welcome.

The theme of today is risk-off following a surge in coronavirus cases in Italy, South Korea and Iran over the weekend. Last week, there was a lot of discussion that Covid-19 would be a one-quarter event, which followed several companies taking Apple’s lead and saying, “yes, we too have shock-resistant supply chains and loyal fans for customers who’ll buy lots of things once they stop dying.” Spin forward a couple of days and we’ve reached the stage where City types forward round medical research to each other as if they understand it -- such as this paper from The Journal of Hospital Infection that suggests human coronaviruses such as SARS and MERS can live on metal, glass or plastic surfaces for as long as nine days.

We mentioned a couple of weeks earlier the McNamara fallacy, which advises against viewing metrics such as body counts as clear and objective measures of anything. Financial markets ❤️ data though, so here we remain. Have some Shore Capital:

Shore says the rate of growth in South Korea “has been staggering in the past three days....

....MUCH MORE