Will Omicron have an Effect on the Market | News or Noise?

News or Noise?!

Hey, I’m Chris Perras, Chief Investment Officer with Oak Harvest Financial Group. This is our investment team’s mid-week release when we examine a news item, headline, or story making the rounds from publicly available sources and ask, “Is it News or Noise?”

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So here we go..

In the short span of 2 weeks, much of the Western world and the American news media has gone from messaging that the Omicron variant Covid strain was going to launch a wave of death and destruction given its ability to transmit 70 times easier than Delta variant, to a big “oh never mind”, its just a short cold for those who are vaccinated, lets do our best to keep the hospital load factor as low as we can, get vaxed.

Never mind that the earliest and first reports out of the scientist and doctors that discovered it in South Africa specifically said that it appeared to be meaningfully less harmful to those who contracted it even if the new strain did evade prior vaccination efforts.

Never mind it was less than a week after the Omicron strain was discovered that Israeli researchers had found that a three-shot course of the Pfizer/ COVID-19 vaccine provided significant protection against the new Omicron variant.  Never mind the opinions of research experts, the news media was out there talking lockdowns and worse case scenarios.

I am not an epidemiologist nor a medical expert, but I do have some wicked googling skills according to my wife, and in a matter of about 15 minutes, it was not hard for me to briefly find some real data on the history and evolutions of viruses during pandemics.  That is how they transmit, multiply, evolve, and try to survive.  It took me another 15 minutes to go back and pull up the research we did on the Spanish flu in the late first quarter of 2020 when many were forecasting a replay of the depression due to the first wave of Covid.  That one didn’t work out so well for the doomsday crowd, did it?

What did these 30 minutes of research provide me?  It provided me the understanding that what we are currently experiencing is still in line with the waves during the Spanish flu outbreak from 1918-1920 in both timing and severity.  Three waves, that occurred over about 20 to 24 months with the second wave, ours being the Delta strain, causing the most severe illness and death.  Infectious disease experts seem to agree that, viruses, such as Covid, mutate in ways that try to latch on and survive in new hosts, and the third, and usually final wave is less severe, burning out rapidly.  I guess viruses believe in the Def Leppard lyrics in their Rock of Ages song, “it’s better to burn out..than fade away”.

Viewers, news strains of Covid are certainly newsworthy, however, unlike TV news media, we counsel you to slow down, take a deep breath, and continue to remove emotions from your financial decisions.

From the whole team at Oak Harvest, thank you for your support and trust throughout 2021, and we hope we can continue to be your partner and provide you with value added service in 2022.

Give us a call here to speak to one of our advisors.  Let us help you craft a financial plan that meets your retirement goals and needs first, and your greed’s second. Call us at (877) 896-0040 we are here to help you on your financial journey into and throughout your retirement years.

 

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1918-commemoration/three-waves.htm

 

 

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