So, what a mess we’ve got ourselves into. Firstly Coronavirus is a human tragedy for all those poor families losing loved ones around the world. I must admit I’m finding it hard to gauge the seriousness of the virus in some respects. This partly comes from the seemingly small proportion of the Chinese population that seem to have suffered (bearing in mind the population of around 1.4 billion). It was reported on the BBC today, that plans were in place to prepare for 80% of the UK population (66 million) to contract the virus. That may be a reasonable worst case, but that would suggest a possible death toll of over a million (2% of 52 million).  It’s very hard to know whether we need to be mildly concerned, or something more. I suppose it’ll become much clearer in the next few days. If we get a moderate spread and human to human transmission rate, we could certainly be facing an economic shock beyond anything we’ve seen in our lifetimes.

I posted on Twitter this morning that I had exited crypto positions with a small profit, and someone described it as having ‘weak hands’. I prefer to see it as being prudent and finding the door before the stampede. My thinking is that if many are forced to take time off work, or even think that might be the case, then it could lead to some large withdrawls to get access to cash. In any case, they have continued to fall today. For those who can stomach the losses, the big picture remains bullish until or unless the support lines are broken to the downside.

Interestingly the US Dollar has dropped somewhat (but not dramatically yet). I’ll reserve judgement on that until the end of the week.

For PMs the story seems to be one of ‘hold your nerve’. The charts look just as good as they did a few days ago. My thinking here is that as economic damage is done to already weak and vulnerable economies around the world, governments are likely to intervene, which, in my view, is PM positive. Anyway, here are the charts for gold, silver & GDX…