How I’m Investing in a Post Pandemic World

Well a lot has happened in the past 5 months when Corona Virus, and COVID-19, became commonplace words that we hear everyday. My kids just call it ‘the corona’. As in don’t worry Dad “she doesn’t have the corona.” I have been pretty much out of commission on the blog, remind me not to prep a home to sell, move your family nearly 300 miles and buy a new home during a pandemic. Things have finally settled down and I plan to publish my thoughts every day or two, even if I haven’t written a lot I’m still going to let it fly and put it out on the blog. I’ll include the usual focus on investing, but I’m thinking of adding in some commentary and personal opinion. Maybe mixed in with a little Dad joke humor, we’ll see how that goes as I’m a pretty sober guy. I guess it will be my way of staying sane while we continue to hunker down at home during the pandemic.

I’m watching today’s Federal Reserve press conference with Chairman Powell. Here are a few statements from Chairman Powell that caught my attention:

“The pandemic has been the biggest shock to the economy in living memory. We went from the lowest unemployment rate to the highest in a matter of months.”

Here’s an interesting chart. This could be an entire blog post discussion, but I’m going to pass on it.

As you can see the change in the U.S. in such a short time period is shocking from 3.7% to 10.4%.

Clearly the world has been dramatically changed in a short period of time. It’s a double whammy! A health and economic crisis wrapped into one that are linked to each other (the ol’ catch-22). If you shut down society to prevent the virus from spreading and you can kill the economy; open things up and you save the economy, but you increase the spread of the virus. It’s enough to make me want to freak out like Matt Damon in the movie The Martian when his potato crop blows up!

Powell also said:

“The path of the economic recovery is directly related to the course of the pandemic.”

Now I don’t always agree with what the Fed says, but in this case the data from the past few months has had a direct correlation. So he is spot on here folks. It seems that the only thing certain is that these are uncertain times.

Personally I’m confident that a COVID-19 vaccine will be developed. When and how effective is anybody’s guess. However, even with a cure I’m not so sure that life will completely return to the way it was prior to the pandemic. The world has changed, kind of like post 9-11 10X.

So what is an investor to do in these uncertain times? I have been giving this a lot of thought lately. I know, it’s a bit of a loaded question! However, I have some ideas on this that I believe will be helpful.

Stay tuned more to come.

Filed in: Stock Market