At the time of writing, the UK has banned flights from countries in Southern Africa with the EU set to follow suit. The culprit is a new strain of the Coronavirus, currently named B.1.1.529 (this will likely be ‘upgraded’ to one of the Greek letters reserved for ‘variants of interest’ in due course), which has been detected in South Africa and Botswana. This mutation has a different spike protein, which raises concerns about the ability of existing vaccines to provide any protection given that they have been developed around the original virus’s spike protein. As a result, European equity indices are in the midst of their worst selloff in a year and US futures currently indicate that markets will open around 2% lower there. The coming days will determine if this is an overreaction.
Peregrine Wealth