Just a month earlier, massive bouts of investor exuberance had pushed the Australian market to a record high of 7,197 points (on February 20). Many economists have called the global coronavirus recession the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression (in the 1930s).īut nobody could have predicted what happened next - particularly given the extreme uncertainty, rapidly escalating death toll, and unprecedented mass lockdowns (domestically and across international borders). Ms Park said her investments had skyrocketed (by more than 50 per cent) since then - far better than how most professional investors did. It's fair to say the fledgling investor has made a killing on the market. But she refused to buy oil and alcohol stocks as she considers them to be "very obviously evil". So Ms Park decided to buy shares in banks, the hard-hit travel sector, telcos and buy-now, pay-later (BNPL) companies. She wanted to invest as ethically as possible but didn't want to be "bogged down by research". "I heard that even if you lose everything in the share market, that's not the worst thing to worry about given the world is collapsing." The ASX 200 has jumped 49 per cent since its low point in March 2020. "My housemate works in finance, and he said it was a great idea to start investing now," she said. Luckily for Ms Park, who manages a cafe in Sydney's inner west (among four other part-time jobs), the market didn't have much further to drop, in hindsight. Newspapers were using terms like "bloodbath", "mayhem" and "carnage" to describe the extent of fear being felt across every share market in the world.
The ASX 200 plunged 9.7 per cent, which worked out to be $160 billion. That caused the market to wipe out all its gains from the past four years (in a single day). They finally decided that COVID-19 was a serious problem that wouldn't "disappear" any time soon (despite US president Donald Trump's insistence at the time).
It was also when the Australian market had suffered its worst trading day since the 1987 crash.īasically, a flood of panicked investors hit the "sell" button at the same time on March 16, 2020. That was despite the world facing its worst health crisis in more than 100 years.
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