Gimme That FOMO!!!

Over the weekend I was looking at an app on TomTom called the world according to traffic. Here is the view I found most interesting. It’s a sampling of traffic across the world. You can also view the Full Ranking which allows you to deep dive into many many cities across a given region.

By looking at this data you get some idea of what’s happening apart from the media narrative. Here is an example:

Wuhan

The real time data is the bold line to the minute. The dashy line is the previous week, and the dotty line is the average for 2019. All you hear about i how CHINA is open. How they squashed the bug so well. If Wuhan is open why does the traffic indicate it’s closed? It was pretty open till last Thursday and now it seems to be closed again.

Guangzhou:

One of my kids comes from Guangzhou. I’ve been there a couple of times. It’s a big bustling city of 13M people. It is the most important financial hub in southern China, but also loaded with industry and manufacturing. Seems like Guangzhou was open till last Thursday and closed on Friday similar to Wuhan. There is a holiday going on in China so maybe that’s the deal.

Hong Kong:

Hong Kong doesn’t have a holiday. It did have a holiday on May 1 so we see a 4 day weekend. On the Covid-19 map China doesn’t report individual data else wise I could look at Hong Kong infection rates vs traffic. So I will look at a city that has both infection data and traffic data NYC

You can see NYC is locked down tight. What about infections using the Johns Hopkins map?

You can see locked down NYC has dramatic improvement in new cases implying NYC has good success in driving down the R0.


This is where I live. It’s pretty closed down but not as closed down as NYC. The Johns Hopkins case map shows only the infection rate for FL so I can track that and it does show individual data for my specific county so I can track that

This is what FL as a state looks like and this is waht Orlando looks like as a data point.

Today FL is supposed to at least partially open up. GA opened up over the weekend. These maps give a way to gauge increased traffic vs increasing or decreasing infection rates and the likelihood of re-quarantine as a function of economic behavior apart from the media spin machine.

Regarding FOMO if the world is shut down as demonstrated by traffic, and the virus is still growing at an exponential clip world wide, I’ll let you complete that thought on your own.

4 Replies to “Gimme That FOMO!!!”

  1. Very nice site and application. And the results correspond nicely with what the Mexican Government is presenting based on mobile phone tower data, Apple phone data, etc. All show a good reduction especially in the larger cities in Mexico.
    I also checked out Moscow which is under a lot of pressure for social distancing and this Tom-Tom data sources shows a good reduction thruout the week and also on weekends.

    1. It’s a data source not easily hidden or spun, and it gives some insight into “on time” and “off time” activity. If no one goes anywhere on weekends it means oil consumption is down 2/7 days which translates into deflation, as an example.

  2. Do you have any guesses when S will eventually HTF, at least as far as the market is concerned? I just looked (it is just after trading hours on May 8), and I am up for the year. Granted, it is not much, but I am positive by a couple thousand net of investment. I haven’t done the math yet to determine my allocation, but I am guessing that I’m +/- 5% on each of my original modified Dalio allocations from 12/31/19 (except cash, which is where contributions/savings have gone since 1/1). This has precluded me from rebalancing, although I was out of balance due to stocks in April, only to be back under my threshhold in a couple of days.

    This seems improbable to me. I read Liz Ann Sonders’ blurb on May 4 (I use Schwab, but this is available from their front page), and she had a quote from one of her mentors, which was, “you can’t fight the Fed.” I guess I agree, and maybe this is what we are seeing, but for how long? The Fed, ECB, etc. have been pumping in cash since 2008-ish, and certainly we have benefited from it, but how much more can they pump in before they really are pushing on a string? I would have thought we were past that point, but maybe not? Could this really go on for a while? Keep in mind, I thought your last post was spot-on. I can’t see how oil, auto manufacturers, anything to do with travel, most of the service economy, and even hospitals and food producers aren’t affected for a long time. Forward P/E means nothing, apparently.

    1. What other market is up for the year? That’s your answer. Which of these things are not like the other, the US stock market, Japan EU South America the rest of Asia Africa Australia Russia Canada and so on and so on and scooby dooby dooby If Asian banks Australian banks Japanese banks European banks Chinese banks AND US banks are underwater what chance do you think your stock ticker is telling you is reality? 34M are presently unemployed or at least filed. 7M mortgages went into forbearance last month How do landlords collect rent on failed businesses or tenants who have no jobs? How do they then pay their loans?. The GDP was slated to be up 3% and closed down -4.8% and that included only 2 weeks of virus, what’s going to hit the fan Q2? The government can’t print GDP. I’ve always been a fan of buying low and selling high myself. There’s something called gravity, best I can tell it always works unless “this time it’s different” I’m thinking by Q3 the writing will be undeniable. Covid will kill 100K by May 31 likely 150K by Aug 31. Who knows by Christmas. It’s unclear we will have the same prez post election. Wish I had some QQQ left to sell. The enemy of long term compounding is short term draw down.

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