I have a friend who recently got his MSFT joining RSUs at $130 a few weeks ago.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I am definitely not feeling as confident in the mid-term, or even long-term outlook as I was then in 2018.
I'm actually feeling better now than I was in October 2018. Rates are lower, tons of financial stimulus, a waning problem and a warming stock market.
That alone could make the difference between 70% vs 30% of the US population getting even with minimal precautions.
It’s really a question of regional R factors under various levels of social distancing, population, and herd imminuty.
It's probably not true and it isn't really based in any biological knowledge but it kind of makes sense in relation to what I've read about how the Spanish Flu epidemic ended.
In the long term, the coronavirus will very likely either be entirely eradicated by human action or become just another cold... but first you have to survive to see that long term.
This is also why the worst diseases you see are zoonoses, diseases that spread from other species. They are co-evolved (if you want the term for this, look up "coevolution") with their hosts, then they jump into us and do the things that they "think" will just lightly affect their hosts and let them spread, and we keel over dead because those are the wrong things.
More pessimistically, NYC’s CFR is almost 5% while in a growth phase when South Korea’s CFR is 2% after cases peaked when it was 0.6% in the growth phase. This suggests NYC is massively undercounting cases and the actual rate of infection could be something like 5-10x as high, with the virus reaching 50+% of the population in months at it’s current rate of spread.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_S...
PS: A more nuanced look taking into account differences in the overall and infected populations could narrow that estimate down. But, it should not be assumed South Korea discovered every case or that each country is counting deaths in the same way.
Pessimistically it seems that something like up to 10% of the city's population got it by the time that almost everything shut down, and now that almost everything is shut down, the spread has been vastly, vastly curtailed, as we see from new hospital admissions figures (which don't suffer from the same kinds of underreporting bias).
Death counts are a less unreliable indicator. Current death counts in NYC- over 7,000 using both the health department counts before Apr 5 plus the FDNY counts, tho even that still has to be an undercount- indicate that at minimum around the time of lockdown (Mar 22) at least 300,000 were "infected"- at a 2% CFR and MTTD of 15 days- but more likely closer to 700,000 or 800,000. That's 3 weeks ago.
With known new death counts currently in the mid to high hundreds, that adds tens of thousands of infections 2-3 weeks ago.
My take is- we are already today at over 1M infections in NYC. And we have a grim fork ahead- either we see a steep drop in death counts, or we see a steady or gradual decline.
A steep drop from lockdown means lockdown works, but also means we still have another few million in susceptible population as things start to open up.
If we only see a gradual or steady decline, COVID more quickly becomes the largest cause of death in NYC for 2020, and we know that lockdown doesnt work well enough to keep from progressing through the population, but we also know we have much less of a susceptible population remaining.
He got the offer and decided on his start date way back in August of last year so any luck he happens by is good luck. He could've chosen to be luckier if the stock price goes down further, but I'd say this is pretty lucky as it is already for something he can't control.
Edit: ignore the tax part, I think I'm wrong there.
That said, I think Microsoft still does a 1-year cliff, so they won't have anything to sell for a year anyway.
(FYI I bought MSFT stock for half that, back in 2017.)