Monday night, a fine end to a fantastic day.

No boring personals news this time around – just the amazing covid-related stuff. Earlier today, Pfizer announced that their covid vaccine is 90% effective. That’s way higher than everyone’s original estimate (40-60%) and downright amazing if you consider that the virus is only about a year old. (Humanity can get shit done, but only if we really, really feel like it.) The phase 3 trial is still in progress, so there’ll be more to come.

It’s pretty funny: Russia couldn’t let westerners have all the glory, so they followed up with their own press release. They claim their Sputnik V vaccine is also 90% effective, but there are no clinical trials and no data, so they just expect us to trust them. Suuuuure, comrades. Putin might as well say that he has an amazing girlfriend but she lives in Canada, so we’ll never get to meet her. It’s rather sad, really.

The stock market had a ridiculous rally today, mostly due to the vaccine news, partly because Biden’s victory got finalized over the weekend. Frankly, I’ve never seen anything like this… Stocks in my porfolio have gone up by anywhere between 9%-39%. (That is not a typo. Yes, one of them went up by thirty-nine percent.) My portfolio’s performance is finally the right side up, eh. A few months ago, I invested in recovery: travel, tourism, commercial real estate, etc. I did not quite call the bottom on all of them, so there was some downward momentum, but once the economy fully recovers, my investments will double – or more. For now, I’m quite content with the knowledge that an awful lot of short-sellers ended up losing lots of cash today. And hey, my overall portfolio went up by 19.4% today. Like I said, I’ve never seen anything like this.

There will be more news later on. Pfizer’s competitors will announce their own vaccine efficiency rates. Pfizer will end their phase 3 and almost certainly get an emergency approval from the FDA. (Dr.Fauci said he fully expects the first vaccinations to take place before the end of the year.) There will be plans for recovery put in place. But there’ll also be more and more new covid cases, more deaths, more economic uncertainty. It’ll be a whiplash cycle of great and terrible news, but we can see the light at the end of the tunnel.