O que significaria o bloqueio do Estreito de Ormuz?

[Ulisses Pereira]

"SARS, the Stock Market and Changing Sentiment"

By Helene Meisler
Special to RealMoney.com
04/23/2003 09:31 AM EDT


"These days I get more emails asking about SARS in China than I do about stocks. After reading dozens of these emails, it occurred to me that the way the SARS news has spread throughout the world was a good lesson for how sentiment works.

Those of us living in Asia started hearing about SARS back in late January or early February when the U.S. consulate began informing us of a new respiratory illness in Guangdong Province. After the Chinese New Year holiday in late February, there was some talk of the disease in Hong Kong, too. By early March, Hong Kong was abuzz with talk of SARS, and some of the private schools were closing.

A couple of weeks later, people in Hong Kong were much more worried about SARS than about the war in Iraq, and some of us here in Shanghai were quite concerned as well, considering the amount of travel going on in China. Still, until later March at least, SARS was rarely front-page news in the U.S.

By early April I told my household staff here to be extra careful and to wash their hands more often. Shanghai doesn't have SARS, they told me. As recently as last week, the staff at an airline ticket office here scoffed when I went in to make a reservation and inquired about masks on the flights. Shanghai has only one case of SARS, they said.

Changing Views

Which brings us to the present. Masks can now be seen throughout Shanghai. When I went back to the same airline ticket counter, the staff were all wearing masks. My husband said that last week the workers in his office were all still willing to travel. This week they don't want to get near an airplane.

What changed? The news out of Beijing. Suddenly the number of SARS patients far exceeded the previous reports, and the condition is spreading to other provinces. Now it's front-page news, no longer relegated to the science and health pages.

Let's compare this to the market and how long it takes sentiment to shift. The market made a low in mid-March. Few investors were bullish at that point. But individual stocks were beginning to hold at higher lows by mid-March, despite the S&P 500's slide to a lower low vs. its worst level from February. The signs were there, but no one believed them.

Then the market rallied, and a few more people become believers. But after March 21, the market headed back down, and some began to falter in their belief. The logic goes that the market must do something to make them believe again. Namely, it must explode upward, breaking out of this trading range and making investors fear that they're going to miss the next big move.

This past weekend in China, the government finally said that the number of SARS cases had been vastly underreported. The health minister and the mayor of Beijing were put out of work. And SARS was on the front page of the newspaper.

So would a breakout from these trading ranges, getting the S&P to a higher high, put the market back on the front pages? Would investors still be able to deny the market's rally? Wouldn't they just have to jump in, afraid of missing the rally? And wouldn't that come just as the market is reaching its maximum overbought reading later this week or into early May? "

(in www.realmoney.com)