I’d like to share a few thoughts and some insight on the stock market and investors reactions to the

• 12/02/21

I’d like to share a few thoughts and some insight on the stock market and investors reactions to the #Omicron variant. Please bear with me until the end, I promise there is a point. After seeing a lot of posts that seem to be politicizing the #coronavirus and the responses to the newest variant, I wanted to take a moment to address a few things. To be clear, this is not a post about my (or yours) politics or governances, but about understanding thought processes behind many of the investors in the world right now. I’ve seen a lot of comparisons of #covid19 to other health issues, and how people haven’t responded to those. I’m not going to address those because honestly, those aren’t related, and were it any other disease or malady, we would not make such comparisons. They are irrelevant. As someone who has lost multiple people to #COVID , including my own mother, I find myself in a position of understanding the reactions that occurred this week. My mother passed in April 2020, before vaccines were available and it is a time that I am unable to forget. More importantly, it is a time that I am not allowed the gift of forgetting. Having lost my father many years before, at the age of 14, I knew what the sudden loss of a parent does to a person... but I can never describe the extreme differences and difficulties that losing my mother to COVID felt like. I was given time to grieve my father. No one provided constant reminders of his cause of death (heart disease) in every possible outlet of communication on social media, tv commercials, audio ads on music apps, billboards, lawn signs, in-game app ads, traffic signs, store signs and pamphlets, and the ever present masks and shields of glass for our safety. I was allowed to think about it, cry about it, and slowly move on. Never was I so bombarded with reminders of one of the worst times in my life, as I have been through the pandemic. Never did anyone ever think to minimize his cause of death with other statistics for other causes of death. But every day, for over a year and a half, I find images of her final days floating into my head as I see and hear those things. It is vivid and clear each time as I recall watching my mother on FaceTime as it ravaged her body slowly. I can smell the flowers of the garden aisles at #Lowes as I desperately searched to find her funeral flowers because florists were in lockdown there at the time. I can still hear how our voices echoed in the nearly empty funeral home, because only ten people were allowed in the room, and we had to conduct her services over #Zoom . Many of her older family missed the services because they couldn’t understand how to operate it and they were isolated (for their safety) from family that could help. I can still feel my feet slipping slightly in the grass in front of her casket after I turned too quickly to watch as hearse after hearse entered the cemetery. Like my mother’s hearse, only a singular car, each with two people inside, followed behind each hearse. I can still taste the blood in my mouth from biting on my tongue too hard as she was deprived her 21 gun salute and flag folding as a #veteran and could be given no a proper burial. So what does all of this have to do with investing? What does this entirely too long “cry-baby” sob story have to do with the stock market? (Please see comments for continuation of post- it would not all fit).

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