Evening Pages: March 23rd, 2020

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the D.C. metro region has been in a state of partial lockdown. To alleviate fear and stress, my writer's group has put together a daily "morning pages" get-together on Zoom in order to touch base before starting the day. Here's some of my brief thoughts.

Today's been quite the productive day. I managed to work out one extremely tricky bug that I finally figured out after like two weeks, I published a blog post on wanting, and I reviewed Sococo, a collaborative virtual office, for organizing an event.

One thing that's been bugging me of late is how well $ZM has been doing. I made a blog post on my initial investment during its IPO, and I provided a partial update on how it was doing. After that update, the stock tanked until it went below its IPO price, and I sold my remaining shares because I got jumpy. My thinking was, "if the stock is tanking like this even before a recession comes, how far will it drop when the recession actually happens? I'll just buy in again at the dip during the next recession".

Turns out, this stock is doing just fine. As of tonight, $ZM closed around $159.56, with a market cap of $44.1B and a (pretty high) P/E ratio of 1,865.54. No doubt, the price will continue rising, because literally the entire world runs on Zoom now, and I'm guessing a whole bunch of companies will be locked into its platform. Andddd it's too expensive for me to purchase because I'm on sabbatical and have no income. So hooray for my awesome decision making skills. Then again, this is probably one of the lesser expected recessionary event out there; the whole thing happened in a matter of weeks with no forewarning from any economic indicators. People had to shut down because otherwise they'll die.

I'm kind of pissed off that U.S. Senator Kelly Loeffler purchased Citrix stock after getting the senators-only coronavirus briefing. I'm like really? Citrix?? I would have immediately bought more Zoom stock. And maybe issued PUT options against airlines. Or maybe even warned people that this was coming and not try to profit off of the pain and suffering of others. Who knows :man_shrugging: This is almost as embarrassing as Donald Trump trying to sell the United States to Putin for one million dollars. I should be betrayed for more money.

It does say something though to have such a curveball event, and such a black swan event, come out of nowhere. I purchased the Incerto book set by Nassim Taleb, and I'm slowly working my way through "The Black Swan", and hope to have a book review out soon. I've never considered the harmful effects of knowing too much, and having that prior blind you to what's possible. Pay close enough attention to economic indicators, and you'll fail to pay attention to epidemiologists and the deteriorating state of the federal government. Pay too much attention to the front of the road, and fail to notice the semi-truck with failed brakes coming behind you. Pay attention to the petty thief, and forget about the computer virus keylogging your bank password. It just goes to show, you can't worry your way out of a problem.

I'm thinking about writing a political crime horror novel. I'm not sure who would buy it, and I'm kind of sure it might end any chance of me being reasonably employed by anybody sane (because this story is horrifyingly insane), but it'll be nice to get the fear out of my system about what's gonna happen or not. Would be much healthier than just sitting on it for months or years at a time.