One paper that influenced market thinking in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic looked at the effect of non-pharmaceutical interventions like social distancing and school closures during the Spanish flu (link here). The paper found that the US cities that implemented these measures tended to have better economic outcomes over the medium term. This offered historical support to the argument that there wasn’t such a big trade-off between economic activity and public health, because you needed to suppress the virus to enable consumers to be more confident and for businesses to operate as normal.

Sell in May and go away - so they saying goes. I wonder if there is a saying for July? Nonetheless, data is more important that sayings in my opinion. As the finance industry survives yet another 30 June, we're right into the month of July.

When it comes to world stock markets, the US is truly in a league of it's own since it declared independence from the rest of the world on 9 March 2009 when world stock markets hit their respective bottoms following the meltdown of the the world's financial system.

Investors have been wondering whether we've seen anything like this before. You know, the stock market crash, and rapid stock market rebound, and the disconnect between the economy and the stock market. Sir John Templeton once said “the four most dangerous words in investing are: this time it’s different”. Yet we think he would agree with us because this time is different – well, maybe during our lifetime anyway.