China still remains the worst-hit country overall by COVID-19 with more than 3,000 confirmed deaths. As the pandemic spreads worldwide, it’s having an impact on the global economy.
Landry Weber, junior in accounting, shared his strategy on what he will be doing with his investments in the stock market during this period of flux.
“I’m in it for the long run, that’s my strategy, so even if it does go down I will actually leave my money in there and buy more stock,” Weber said. “That’s what I did.
“From different readings, the most important time to invest is in your late teens and early twenties because you can be very aggressive in your investing, you can take risks with it,” Weber said. “Right now I’m losing money, but hopefully will bounce back and make more money, even five years down the road.”
The stock market has dropped significantly as people take out the money they’ve invest in order to avoid losing large sums of money, Logan Miller, junior in architecture, said.
Miller said he has some flexibility to move around his short-term investments, but his long-term investments will stay put.
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“[Coronavirus] freaks people out because it’s different, they don’t know what’s going on, they are not 100 percent certain,” Miller said. “It is causing some shortages in material goods because a lot of it comes from China.
“Overall a lot of industries shouldn’t take a hit, it’s just people freaking out and pulling out the money that they have invested to save themselves,” he said. “The more people sell their investments the more other people want to sell and all of a sudden, the value in the stock market has declined because there are not as many people apart of it and companies aren’t worth as much.”
Jack Casburn, senior in mechanical engineering, gave his advice on what new investors could be doing.
“I would tell a new investor to wait, at least for the virus to be out of the news, once the buzz of it all goes down,” Casburn said.
Casburn feels like the stock market reaction is based on how news and media outlets have portrayed the novel coronavirus.
“Because of what’s in the news, the stock market overcompensates sometimes so I think waiting to see what happens is best,” Casburn said. “For all I know, the coronavirus could blow up even more than it has so I would recommend waiting it out because you don’t know what’s going to happen.”
Casburn said he’s has thought about taking advantage of the low stock market prices to invest more, but he hasn’t decided yet.
“It’s like, do you continue to wait and wait or do you take advantage of the opportunity now?” he said.
