Monday August 10. Tech stocks are having their second bad day. Here’s the last two days of Nasdaq — today and Friday.
These two days are more of a blip than a trend in this year’s Nasdaq. Hence I’m not worried.
To my brain, the major factor determining where we go from now is the virus, which has caused trillions of dollars of damage to the economy and to the millions of people who’ve lost their jobs, heir homes, their cars and busted up their marriages.
Hence it’s best for me to start today’s blog with upbeat information on vaccines and cures.
Bill Gates is surprisingly upbeat on us defeating the coronavirus
He gave an interview to Wired Magazine.
The caption on this photo reads, “Despite trillions of dollars of economic damage, Bill Gates is optimistic that a strong pipeline of therapies and vaccines will carry the US through the pandemic.”
Gates is the guy who warned us of this pandemic years ago in a prescient 2015 TED talk. He’s also the guy who heads the largest private foundation in the world and is giving huge money to vaccine makers and is giving (largely, unheeded) advice to the Federal Government and its agencies.
Here’s an excerpt from this savvy interview:
At this point, are you optimistic?
Yes. You have to admit there’s been trillions of dollars of economic damage done and a lot of debts, but the innovation pipeline on scaling up diagnostics, on new therapeutics, on vaccines is actually quite impressive. And that makes me feel like, for the rich world, we should largely be able to end this thing by the end of 2021, and for the world at large by the end of 2022. That is only because of the scale of the innovation that’s taking place. Now whenever we get this done, we will have lost many years in malaria and polio and HIV and the indebtedness of countries of all sizes and instability. It’ll take you years beyond that before you’d even get back to where you were at the start of 2020. It’s not World War I or World War II, but it is in that order of magnitude as a negative shock to the system.
In March it was unimaginable that you’d be giving us that timeline and saying it’s great.
Well it’s because of innovation that you don’t have to contemplate an even sadder statement, which is this thing will be raging for five years until natural immunity is our only hope.
Let’s talk vaccines, which your foundation is investing in. Is there anything that’s shaping up relatively quickly that could be safe and effective?
Before the epidemic came, we saw huge potential in the RNA vaccines—Moderna, Pfizer/BioNTech, and CureVac. Right now, because of the way you manufacture them, and the difficulty of scaling up, they are more likely—if they are helpful—to help in the rich countries. They won’t be the low-cost, scalable solution for the world at large. There you’d look more at AstraZeneca or Johnson & Johnson. This disease, from both the animal data and the phase 1 data, seems to be very vaccine preventable. There are questions still. It will take us awhile to figure out the duration [of protection], and the efficacy in elderly, although we think that’s going to be quite good. Are there any side effects, which you really have to get out in those large phase 3 groups and even after that through lots of monitoring to see if there are any autoimmune diseases or conditions that the vaccine could interact with in a deleterious fashion.
Wired asked him if he got sick…
Speaking of therapeutics, if you were in the hospital and you have the disease and you’re looking over the doctor’s shoulder, what treatment are you going to ask for?
Remdesivir. Sadly the trials in the US have been so chaotic that the actual proven effect is kind of small. Potentially the effect is much larger than that. It’s insane how confused the trials here in the US have been. The supply of that is going up in the US; it will be quite available for the next few months. Also dexamethasone—it’s actually a fairly cheap drug—that’s for late-stage disease.
I’m assuming you’re not going to have trouble paying for it, Bill, so you could ask for anything.
Well, I don’t want special treatment, so that’s a tricky thing. Other antivirals are two to three months away. Antibodies are two to three months away. We’ve had about a factor-of-two improvement in hospital outcomes already, and that’s with just remdesivir and dexamethasone. These other things will be additive to that.
Stock stuff:
+ Microsoft will overpay for Tik Tok and will probably mismanage it, though not as bad an Intel, Verizon or AT&T have done with their recent acquisitions. Read more on Microsoft and TikTok here. Most acquisitions don’t work because the new owners ignore the old management, which then leaves. (Been there, done that. Been ignored.)
+ Why is Verizon spending so much to advertise 5G, when its 4G and LTE are so awful in vast swaths of mid-New York State, like Columbia County where I am. And what can I possibly do to get 5G, anyway? Buy an iPhone 12 or iPhone 13? They exist?
Stock philosophy
I don’t like investing in things you can find, grow or produce quickly — for example, oil, gold, commodities, cannabis (marijuana) and … hand sanitizer. A few months ago, it sold for $50 a gallon, but then everyone got into that “booming” business and it’s now $10 a gallon. Personally, I prefer soap. Good old Dove.
Its a good time for new ideas
My tennis partner, Mark Johnson, berates me because I don’t realize that 65% of the world goes to the Internet through their smartphone and that most people (including everyone’s customers) use texting.
Most landlines don’t take texts which is a pain. Now there’s a $16 a month way. It’s called www.TextMeAnywhere.com.
Send me a text to my landline five one eight three nine two thirty three hundred and I’ll reply from my laptop. It’s neat.
In case you’re wondering
What is QAnon?
It’s a conspiracy theory claiming that world leaders, Democrats, and “deep state” U.S. intelligence officers are all involved in a global child sex trafficking ring that President Trump and his supporters are working to expose and destroy.
QAnon is gaining huge numbers of followers by the day and will soon have representation in Congress. Read more here.
Sometimes my masochism runs rampant
The latest fashion in suckering investors into advisory services are long videos that prattle on for eternity about the forces of doom and gloom descending on us all. Of the genre, this is the best one. I actually listened to for nearly half an hour. I really wanted to hear how many words could be strung together to, in the end, say absolutely nothing, Except you should subscribe to Stansberry Research, which may or may not do good work.
Here you are. I couldn’t have said it better
How to shop during the pandemic (This is priceless)
A little old lady went to the grocery store to buy cat food. She picked up three cans and took them to the check out counter.
The girl at the cash register said, “I’m sorry, but we cannot sell you cat food without proof that you have a cat. A lot of old people buy cat food to eat, and the management wants proof that you are buying the cat food for your cat.” The little old lady went home, picked up her cat and brought it back to the store. They sold her the cat food. The next day, she tried to buy two cans of dog food.
Again, the cashier said, “I’m sorry, but we cannot sell you dog food without proof that you have a dog. A lot of old people buy dog food to eat, but the management wants proof that you are buying the dog food for your dog.”
So she went home and brought in her dog.
She then was able to buy the dog food. The next day she brought in a box with a hole in the lid.
The little old lady asked the cashier to stick her finger in the hole.
The cashier balked, “No, you might have a snake in there.”
The little old lady assured her that there was nothing in the box that would harm her.
So the cashier put her finger into the box and quickly pulled it out. She said to the little old lady, “That smells like shit.”
The little old lady said, “It is. I want to buy a roll of toilet paper.”
A wonderful short Italian video. Oops
How the British are coping
Read his jacket. Now look where he’s standing.
Personal health. Several keys:
+ We played our 149th consecutive game of tennis this morning. Exercise is good, even walking. Tennis is better. I got my heart rate up to 125.
+ I’m cutting back on food. Some of my friends have chosen this time to lose weight and have been successful. My other friends should also.
+ An afternoon nap keeps the stress away. Saves me reading all the depressing stuff out there.
Where the world is going.
The best way to predict the future is to choose it. — Abraham Lincoln.
See you tomorrow — Harry Newton
