Five questions every investor should be asking about the coronavirus and what it will next do to stock markets
- Fever hotspots in US? Real time vehicle traffic? Analysts are looking at unusual data sources to make their bets
- What if the virus comes back? That kind of ‘Stephen King’ question keeps analysts up at night
Simon Powell watches fever hotspots in America. Stephen Innes pores over real-time measurements of vehicle traffic – or the lack of it – in cities around the globe. And, Mark Galasiewski studies stock performance charts from the time of Sars and the 1968 flu pandemic.
The three financial analysts are tapping diverse and sometimes quite esoteric data to try to predict how the spreading coronavirus pandemic will affect the price of assets – everything from stocks on Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index to gold and orange juice futures.
Even obesity rates in the US may be worth pondering because they might explain why young people seem to account for a higher portion of infections in America than in China. That, in turn, has implications not only for short-term stock prices but also for the future of the US workforce.
And those orange juice futures? They spiked, signalling a surge in demand for Vitamin C just when supplies were getting harder to transport.
“Economics in the time of Covid-19 is a different beast, with the best data being real time that provides insight into the extent of the slowdown,” said Thailand-based Innes, chief global asset strategist at AxiCorp, who finds himself up before dawn to check data from other parts of the world.
“I’m using more real-time data now than I ever have before. I would never ever care about initial [US unemployment] claims, but it is huge now. … I would never wake up at 2am [to check it] on such a regular basis,” he said.