Data PloughingFF

Each day Atlas takes raw data and turns it into useable information as we monitor risks in our managed portfolios.  Our proprietary algorithm processes figures from billions of dollars trading hands during market hours here in America.  Scouring the globe for useful data can be exhausting.  You can imagine the relief our processors experienced when we found a firm offering its Feng Shui analysis for the coming year.

CLSA (previously Credit Lyonnaise Securities Asia) is a brokerage firm founded in 1986 in Hong Kong by a couple of journalists.  Each year, this firm produces a light-hearted guide to investing based on the zodiac animals of the lunar calendar.  As luck would have it, we’ve just entered the year of the Ox.  And because the time it started (11:59 PM on February 03, 2021), the year is also associated with metal (instead of water, fire, wood, or earth).

As they see it, this should be a good year. Last year’s Rat handed over the reins to an equally industrious Ox.  Now, the Ox can’t plough nonstop so there will be fits and starts as the year progresses.  Nothing out of the ordinary given the past twelve months though, right?

We have to go back to 2009, the last time the Ox controlled our fate.  And to the beast of burden’s credit, it pulled the economy through one of the worst periods on record: the recession affiliated with the Great Financial Crisis ended shortly after the Ox took over.  Atlas doesn’t want to draw conclusions because we all know that past performance is no guarantee of future results, but the lunar calendar could be lining up perfectly for an economy coming out of another global challenge.