I took a trip to BJ’s yesterday morning. As I was about to leave the lady at the door checking receipts saw a pack of Clorox Wipes in my cart and asked, “you stocking up for the coronavirus?”
I wasn’t.
I just needed the wipes for basic cleaning. But she said a lot of people have told her they were buying them up to prepare for coronavirus.
I had read a few posts about people stocking up on Clorox Wipes, toilet paper, emergency meal kits, water, and other basic essentials to prepare for the spread of coronavirus here in the U.S. Among those posts was a story on ZeroHedge about a Sam’s Club in Hawaii selling out of toilet paper and a story on InfoWars about a Costco selling out of emergency food kits.
So after getting home from BJ’s and putting groceries away I decided to check if any retailers had sold out of Clorox Wipes. They hadn’t. But checking Costco’s website this morning, I found this…
Wholesale retailers BJ’s and Sam’s Club still have Clorox Wipes available on their websites – as do stores like Target and Walmart. But I think Costco selling out of Clorox Wipes is a decent sign of peak panic.
According to worldmeters.info, there are now 87,674 confirmed coronavirus cases with 2,994 deaths and 42,629 recoveries. While the number of confirmed nCov cases and the death toll continues to rise, the rate of increase for both has significantly slowed down.
And while I’m not an epidemiologist, I think the decreased rate of increase in both cases and deaths is also a good sign we’re also nearing the end of the panic.
I still maintain that nCov is not the main cause for last week’s global market sell-off. But an end to the nCov panic will certainly help markets get back on track. So I still think it’s a good time to start buying again.
Shares of Clorox (NYSE: CLX) climbed over 2.5% last week before giving up gains to ending 3.2% lower for the week on Friday.
Until next time,
Luke Burgess
As an editor at Energy and Capital, Luke’s analysis and market research reach hundreds of thousands of investors every day. Luke is also a contributing editor of Angel Publishing’s Bull and Bust Report newsletter. There, he helps investors in leveraging the future supply-demand imbalance that he believes could be key to a cyclical upswing in the hard asset markets. For more on Luke, go to his editor’s page.
