Too late to sell; too early to buy

 

I've been in the sharemarket for a long time and have seen many ups and downs, but this coronavirus panic-selling rout is the worst I've ever seen. In the space of just a week, the ASX 200 has gone from a record closing high of 7,162 last Thursday to a low of 6,427 in today's session.

It's the biggest weekly drop for both Australian and US share markets since October 2008, during the peak of the global financial crisis market chaos. As one economist opined, "Stocks and bonds say we're doomed. Anyone who has a better idea for what lies ahead please let us know because right now the direction ahead for the economy is straight down. If global supply chains start freezing up, due to a lack of materials or credit, or both, no amount of rate-cutting will unlock that. If small to medium enterprises can't get paid for their invoices, or pay theirs, or secure raw materials, or transport goods, the net effect is shuttered businesses and job losses."

Another portfolio manager said that there is likely to be further panic and downside before markets settle down. "As so far this has all been driven by offshore infection rates, further escalations over the weekend may see another leg down next week. We think the market is late reacting to coronavirus which has been spreading across borders for over a week. We haven't yet hit peak panic and there may be another leg down for markets."

I've been more or less fully invested throughout all previous crises, and this one is no exception, which means that this current sharemarket rout has dropped my portfolio by nearly 20% (which doesn't sound much until you convert it into a dollar figure), taking it right back to where it was in March 2019 before three fat dividend pay-outs and a big franking credit tax refund.

Of course, it would've been nice to have had the foresight to lighten up before this sharp drop, and to now sit on a pile of cash to buy back in when the market has bottomed, as it will, but what's done is done and cannot be undone, and it will be a long time before the markets recover to anything like they have been in recent weeks and months.

The best antidote to a panic is to not join in yourself, because that's the other good thing about old age: whether the market drops by another 20%, or stays where it is, or recovers some lost ground, there'll always be enough to see me through my personal time horizon of the next five years, ten years, or even twenty years. I'll drink to that!

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P.S. Did I really write 'the other good thing about old age' ? Remind me: what's the other?

 

Riverbend's very own story

 

The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home. First with brooms, then with dusters; then on ladders and steps and chairs, with a brush and a pail of whitewash; till he had dust in his throat and eyes, and splashes of whitewash all over his black fur, and an aching back and weary arms. Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing. It was small wonder, then, that he suddenly flung down his brush on the floor, said ‘Bother!’ and ‘O blow!’ and also ‘Hang spring-cleaning!’ and bolted out of the house without even waiting to put on his coat. Something up above was calling him imperiously, and he made for the steep little tunnel which answered in his case to the gravelled carriage-drive owned by animals whose residences are nearer to the sun and air. So he scraped and scratched and scrabbled and scrooged and then he scrooged again and scrabbled and scratched and scraped, working busily with his little paws and muttering to himself, ‘Up we go! Up we go!’ till at last, pop! his snout came out into the sunlight, and he found himself rolling in the warm grass of a great meadow."

Okay, keep on reading! I know you want to! Click here.

 

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Happiness on a stick

Support Prof. Milross's CAPE TO CAPE TREK to raise money for Chris O'Brien Lifehouse.
Chris O’Brien Lifehouse is Australia’s first not-for-profit cancer hospital with all cancer services under one roof. As a not-for-profit hospital they rely on the ongoing support of the community to achieve lasting change in the way they prevent and treat cancer in Australia. To learn more about their current work www.mylifehouse.org.au.

 

The surgeon's scalpel is clean and gleaming and precise, like a paring knife scooping a bruise out of a fruit. But cancer cells can evade both the X-ray and the knife, the eye and the blade. The fugitive cells elude detection; they could be anywhere, or nowhere.

Absence of ocular proof is no reason to believe that the cancer isn’t there; on the contrary, absence multiplies the paranoid suspicion of its lurking presence, as Othello well knew. And so it was back to Sydney for another Positron Emission Tomography, or PET for short.

However, it's neither a pet nor is it short, so before I entered that lead-lined room where they would give me that radioactive injection which would then need to course (or curse, depending on your point of view) through my veins for a whole hour before they put me through that 'Tunnel of Love' for another thirty minutes, I thought I'd better grab Jerome K. Jerome's book "Three Men in a Boat" to while away the time.

The nurse who was about to stick that canulla into my vein - in vain at first as the vein in my arm kept collapsing long before I did - forbade me to occupy my brain with a slow re-read of something as innocent as "Three Men in a Boat" despite my assurances that it was not D.H. Lawrence's "Lady Chatterley's Lover".

Lying there and starring with vacuous eyes at the lead-lined walls, I was uplifted to detect a small notice on the wall which read - inter alia, as you Latin scholars would say -, "We scan many patients; each time staff come into contact with a patient who has been injected for a scan, they are exposed to radiation ..." What an old-fashioned and beautifully correct use of a semicolon, that little break midway between the quick skip of a comma and the patient pause of a full-stop!

The lead-lining may stop radiation but not noise from coming through the walls and so I was forced to eavesdrop on an octogenarian's mobile phone conversation in the adjoining injecting room - I never saw him but knew his age because we had to identify ourselves constantly to the incoming attendants by name and date of birth. "Too much information!" I felt like screaming as his fruity language excited me more than even D.H. Lawrence would've done. And what about allowing a mobile phone but not "Three Men in a Boat"?

An hour later I was commanded to empty my bladder in a room marked "Patient's Toilet" - what? do they only have one patient? what a letdown after that lovely semicolon! - before being shuttled back and forth for another thirty minutes in that claustrophobia-causing "Tunnel of Love".

The results of the scan were given to me on a stick. They were said to be negative which sounded absolutely positive. Happiness on a stick!

 

 

Maybe I've started reading Eugene O'Kelly's book too soon. Maybe I will live forever! So far so good!

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P.S. I am back at peaceful "Riverbend". Padma tells me she wants to visit her sister in Melbourne for a week. Why not make it two weeks and give me a holiday as well? She has booked the V/Line bus for Sunday after which "Riverbend" will be even more peaceful! Dulce Domum.

 

What bust?

 

While the coronavirus is killing the sharemarket - with my own portfolio down by 15% which doesn't sound much until you translate it into real dollars - the long-awaited real estate bust never happened!

Take 6/157 Blues Point Road at McMahons Point as an example: advertised for auction on 22 February 2020 with a price guide of $650,000, it sold on the day for $801,000!

It's almost identical to my own hole in the wall two doors up, right down to the unit number, except for the "Sunroom/Study" and the deliberately undersized display furniture which create the illusion of spaciousness.

Even the Art Deco bathroom and the eat-in (or should that be squeeze-in?) kitchen look almost the same.

Not that I could ever live there again, but it's a nice little earner, and at around $800,000 a cosy little nest-egg! More here.

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"Chris est mort hier"

 

Chris Mellen with his charming wife

 

Pete, I met you in the early '80s when I acted as a barley broker between various grain traders and Abdul Ghani. If this message reaches you it would be great to catch up, and I would like to get in touch with Abdul Ghani."

That email in October 2010 - see here - renewed an old acquaintance which morphed into a long friendship which lasted until - well, 'hier'.

Chris Mellen, with a Bachelor of Arts in International Relations and Affairs from the University of Sussex and and a Master of Science in Economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science, was a true renaissance man, multi-talented, multi-lingual, multi-marital (four at last count!), and, born a Jew and raised by the Jesuits and converting to Islam in 2000, even multi-religious.

 

Suave and flamboyant Chris in better days - taken from his LinkedIn profile

 

We shared many interests - apart from our past commodity trading in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia - such as a love for the writings of Julian Barnes - we both subscribed to his sentiment in "The Sense of an Ending" that "... the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn't all it's cracked up to be" - and Hermann Hesse, with Chris sometimes calling himself Goldmund - as he confessed, "No savings left after a timetime of living beyond my means. My life has been rather self-indulgent. I rarely refused myself anything" - and, by inference, me being Narcissus.

More than a year ago, Chris was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer which confined him to months and months of hospitalisation and vicious chemotherapy as well as several bonemarrow transplants - "I'm due for my tenth spinal tap; the treatment costs so far are $750,000" - and a myriad of other 'medical advances', none of which worked.

 

 

As he wrote, "I'm struggling with the discomfort, the endless pain, and incipient depression." By 14 October 2019 he'd had enough. "I am home. The cancer has morphed into acute leukemia and is incurable. I hope to see another year but ... I am trying to seize the carp every day. It's challenging. I enjoy your news and admire your energy."

A fortnight later he'd found enough energy himself to get back in the saddle: "Took the old girl out for a spin today. It's my hormone replacement therapy."

 

 

But it was not to last and he was back in hospital for more treatment ...

 

 

On 31 December 2019 he WhatsApp-ed me, "Thank you for your messages and commentaries - much appreciated. The doctors have run out of ideas and I hope to be able to go home to die in the next few days. Sorry to admit this, but I love you old bastard, and I admire you, fucking fascist that you are ☺. I'm thinking of you, you crusty old dog."

And shortly afterwards, "I'm breaking out. I've had enough. My wife will take me home tonight. Halle-fucking-lujah. I wish we could celebrate the shit and derision of this dystopian disaster together. I feel so close to you, you miserable bastard."

 

 

Back in bucolic Bussy-sur-Moudon (population 198 which, until recently, he was still trying to improve on), Chris was a happy man: "I'm home, recovering from the trauma of the last year. I am a happy man. I am a satisfied man ... no regrets ... I have been true to myself and have accepted who I am and the choices I have made. My wife is the love of my life and my kids are very close to me. Good night, my dear friend."

We kept on exchanging thoughts and ideas and I told him about the devastating bushfires which had us almost wiped out as well, to which he replied in typical irreverent Chris Mellen fashion, "I'm praying for you, Christian, Jewish and Muslim ... I am mumbling incomprehensible guttural sounds on my hands and knees with my asshole aimed away from the south-east and towards the glittering heavens, all on your behalf. I have difficulty reading. These are the side effects of the chemo. I am damaged goods after ten cycles of chemo treatment. So my current challenge is to assess what's left and accept my new me and learn to live with both the cancer and the after-effects of the chemo instead of engaging in a head-on war with a disease that we do not understand. My treatment was not the fruit of a scientific analysis but the result of the doctors' hunches. I was unaware of the primitive methodology of this pseudo-science that we call medicine. I am planning to keep going for another decade. I am ready to make big compromises in order to remain active in this new life. It's the constant pain that prevents me from having a good laugh but if that's part of the deal, so be it. I'm far from ready to go."

Suddenly, on 4 February 2020, the decade had shrunk to just a few days, " I've been given a few days to live. I just want you to know how much I have appreciated your friendship. See you on the other side, brother."

What could I say to that, other than to pass it off light-heartedly, "Don't believe everything you're told, Chris. You'll probably still sell a few loads of barley before you go (although not to Abdulghani). 'See you on the other side'. That's what the surgical assistant said to me before they wheeled me into the operating theatre which confused me no end. When I woke up again and she was leaning over me, asking for my date of birth and how many fingers she was holding up, I was quite surprised because I had always been told that St. Peter had a long white beard."

Silence for a week, and then this morning's "Chris est mort hier", presumably from his wife. Je suis tellement, tellement désolé.

They say the only death we experience is other people's, and I've experienced Chris's slow demise for over a year. See you on the other side, you old bastard! We both know we're checking out just in time!

 

Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage. Without her you would have never set out on the road. She has nothing more to give you. And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not deceived you. Wise as you have become, with so much experience, you must already have understood what Ithacas mean.                                    --Constantine P. Cavafy

 

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Three Men in a Boat

 

Jerome K. Jerome's hilarious story of what is probably the worst holiday in literature has an air of delightful nostalgia and is still laugh-aloud funny more than a hundred years after it what first published with this preface:

 

 

And yet, it is full of wisdom as well, "... not merely as regards the present case, but with reference to our trip up the river of life generally. How many people, on that voyage, load up the boat till it is in danger of swamping with a store of foolish things which they think essential to the pleasure and comfort of the trip, but which are really only useless lumber.

How they pile the poor little craft mast-high with fine clothes and big houses; with useless servants, and a host of swell friends that do not care twopence for them, and that they do not care three ha'pence for; with expensive entertainments that nobody enjoys, with formalities and fashions, with pretence and ostentation, and with - oh, heaviest, maddest lumber of all! - the dread of what will my neighbour think, with luxuries that only cloy, with pleasures that bore, with empty show that, like the criminal's iron crown of yore, makes to bleed and swoon the aching head that wears it!

It is lumber, man - all lumber! Throw it overboard. It makes the boat so heavy to pull, you nearly faint at the oars. It makes it so cumbersome and dangerous to manage, you never know a moment's freedom from anxiety and care, never gain a moment's rest for dreamy laziness - no time to watch the windy shadows skimming lightly o'er the shallows, or the glittering sunbeams flitting in and out among the ripples, or the great trees by the margin looking down at their own image, or the woods all green and golden, or the lilies white and yellow, or the sombre-waving rushes, or the sedges, or the orchis, or the forget-me-nots.

Throw the lumber over, man! Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need - a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing.

You will find the boat easier to pull then, and it will not be so liable to upset, and it will not matter so much if it does upset; good, plain merchandise will stand water. You will have time to think as well as to work ..."

There is so much insight packed into this little book - useful information indeed, to say nothing of the dog! - that you almost regret having come to their final toast, "Here's to Three Men well out of a Boat!"

But that's a whole 184 pages later, so sit back and enjoy! (or listen here to the audiobook)

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