Final Friday – 2021 Ends With Record High – Covid Cases

Winning!  

If Charlie Sheen has taught us nothing else, it's that saying you are winning – over and over again – can actually make people think you are winning…  Even when things are actually spiraling out of control.  Yesterday, the US set a new record with 582,044 cases of Covid reported in 24 hours, just as we head into the one day a year when it can be guaranteed that people will be gathering in large crowds this evening.  Winning!

We are winning with our S&P 500 (/ES) Futures shorts, those are up over $4,700 already but this time (unlike Thanksgiving), we are keeping our hedge on into the holiday weekend.  Speaking of holiday weekends – for some reason, the stock markets are open today but I'm declaring a half day – unless something crazy is happening by lunch.  

Nothing happening in the markets during this low-volume week actually matters but, when we cross 1M new cases of Covid per day in January – that might start to matter.  So far, thankfully, the death rates and hospitalization rates are not so bad but the total number of deaths in the US is about to hit 850,000 (1.5%) out of 54.3M Americans who have been infected so far.  

In the past month, 5.4M people have been infected – that's 10% of the people who were infected over the prior two years and 37,114 people died – that's 4.3% of the people who died in total and that's only 0.67% of the people recently infected so WINNING as half as many people are dying even though twice as many people are being infected – winning!  

On a positive note, 9,138,204,546 doses of vaccine have been administered globally but, unfortunately, 2.5Bn of us in the US, Europe, China and Japan have gotten 7.5Bn doses and the other 5.5Bn people have had to share the remainng 1.5Bn does.  Winning!   Being vaccinated does seem to help but America has 100M unvaccinated citizens and Omicron is spreading through that population like a conspiracy theory at a Trump rally.  Winning.

We are indeed fortunate (winning) that the Omicron…

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