Bulletproof Investing

CHAPTER 18Making the best of the worst

The year 2020 will be forever remembered for all the wrong reasons: death, destruction, panic, pressure, tension, turmoil … the list goes on. At an individual level, we suffered everything from mild inconvenience to complete chaos, but everybody around the world was affected in some way. COVID-19 hit public consciousness like a tsunami. It seemed every night there was a tidal wave of bad news roaring in and destroying lives in one country or another. We were glued to stories of infection and death and, inevitably, predictions of the end of the financial world as we know it.

Here's a quick recap of the sequence of events, as they unfolded. The first COVID-19 death in Australia was on 1 March 2020. By 18 March, the Australian government had banned international travel and gatherings of 100 people. By the end of March, most Australian states had imposed lockdown measures to prevent public and private gatherings, on top of limiting movement between states and within cities. Leaders and public figures were predicting up to 20 million Australians could become infected and as many as 200 000 would die in the first year. Experts said there was no possibility of a working vaccine for at least two, possibly three, years. The stock market dropped 36.5 per cent in a month, small and medium sized companies crumbled and many large organisations hit the wall or went onto some form of life support. Unemployment was tipped to hit 20 per cent and practically ...