A few observations however. No sooner had we posted on the template that Hong Kong provided for the west, both good and bad, than Hong Kong itself doubled down on the bad side, closing schools, gyms and all evening restaurant dining on a modest spike up in cases and an increase in deaths

The revelation this week not only that Wirecard has filed for insolvency and CEO Marcus Braun been arrested, but that the ex derivative traders now running the SoftBank Vision fund had constructed something akin to a pump and dump scheme for a convertible bond scheme are building into a saga that needs the skills of someone like Michael Lewis to write a whole book about it.

The markets had a choppy week as the noise trader equity rally ran out of steam and reversed somewhat, before the Fed once again provided support, this time through direct buying of US corporate debt.

Well that didn’t take long. At the start of the week we noted that the noise traders had been making one of their periodic forays into equity markets and pointed to a number of ‘red flags’ suggesting that fear was turning to greed.

When the virus scare began we noted that there would be two important components to calling the bottom from a market perspective; first that the rate of growth of new cases would have to slow – the second derivative – and second, we needed to observe how despite this occurring, the market mechanics themselves chose to behave in the face of this.