Markets scare and there is something to be afraid of

On Monday, the markets were finally really scared. The coronavirus epidemic is becoming global, and the economic consequences are increasingly threatening. Every day, China's downtime literally increases the problem exponentially.

Actually, some analysts are already talking about the critical level of problems and damage. For example, a survey of managers of more than 1,500 Chinese small and medium enterprises (small and medium enterprises accounted for 99.8% of all companies registered in China and 79.4% of all employees work in them) showed that 85% of them will use up all their cash reserves in 3 months. But this is a potential threat. As for the real ones (that is, the damage that has already been done), 50% of respondents said that an outbreak of coronavirus will reduce their annual profit by at least 50%.

And according to the latest Dun & Bradstreet research from the list of Fortune 1000 companies, the main supplier is China for 163 companies, and for 938 China is a second-tier supplier, that is, their main supplier depends on supplies from China.

Thus, the level of dependence of the world economy on China is critical - about 94% (!). Accordingly, the problems will increase like a snowball. And lowering Apple’s forecasts last week will seem like an innocent joke compared to what the global economy can really expect. In the best case, corporations will sag strongly in profits, and in the worst, they will greatly sag in income.

Not surprisingly, the Fear Index (VIX) showed 50% growth during the day. It is rather surprising that he has not grown recently. And the gold maximums in the region of 1700 - this is not all that the asset wanted to say on this subject, and sales on the global stock markets by and large just started.

The yield on thirty US Treasury bonds, meanwhile, reached a historic low. Which, in general, explains why the dollar has recently felt so confident in the foreign exchange market.

Our basic positions today are unchanged: we are looking for points for buying gold (but given the strong oversoldness of the asset, we are doing this conservatively and with obligatory stops), we sell oil, we sell EURUSD, we buy GBPUSD, we sell USDJPY with small stops.