All through December and into mid-January, investor nervousness around valuations was growing more and more palpable. But no one wanted to leave rally money on the table. Some kind of trigger was needed to spur profit-taking. As sometimes though not always happens, the event trigger was something no one could have foreseen. Incubated in a wild animal market in China’s Hubei province, the coronavirus first crossed provincial borders and then national borders. The disease appears to be faster moving than SARS and MERS, which have been identified as sharing some common points with the virus. It should be noted that once SARS and MERS were contained and vaccines developed, those outbreaks left behind little lasting economic damage.