The economy continues to be buffeted from the Covid 19 corona virus–just now I see another 1.3 million new unemployment claims.
Of course if you are investing in common equities you don’t care how poorly the economy will do for the next year or two–you just follow the Robinhood traders into Royal Caribbean (RCL) Delta (DAL) or maybe even bankrupt Hertz (HTZ). I don’t need to go to the casino–just fire up my device. Everyone is an expert on their huge unemployment checks or payroll protection money (PPP).
Activity in new issues has been exceptionally quiet in the last 2 weeks–maybe everybody is so massively levered up there is no need to raise more money. All the ‘zombie’ companies have the balance sheets loaded with 10-12% money–which is why they are going to be zombies–lots of debt payments and no revenue–i.e. airlines, cruise lines etc.
I have been doing virtually no buying and selling–just hanging in there with my 65-70% invested positions of utility and CEF preferreds and baby bonds–but I am getting antsy and likely will do some short term captures of dividends and interest of investment grade issues–just forgoing too much income with the current level of cash.
On the other hand I have little doubt that an ‘event‘ will give us much better buying opportunities ahead–it may be political or investors will wake up 1 morning and decide that it will be years before we see normalcy–who knows–no one.
Even though I am ‘antsy’ my ‘real work’ keeps me working 12 hours a day, 7 days a week–with only 3-4 days off all year–so my ability to stay in tune with markets has been limited. The flip side is I have never in my life put so much money into investment accounts–so the ‘stash’ balances have risen fast–I guess that is the positive of working so much (at a time I swore I would be full time on this website instead of doing ‘real work’).