If it's going to be anything like the last two recessions it's going to cash and (if it dips) real estate, and soon after that it'll be back on the tech stocks that survive. There's really not that much alternatives barring a huge shift in the economy as to where you want to park your wealth if you don't want to trust how much dollars the Fed will print.
Yes this is exactly the point. In march, energy prices shot to demand destroying levels and at that point even if the prices would continue to increase near term, it was obvious that consumers (ie industry, production) will start scaling back as their profit margins are eaten by energy costs.
Tricky to say unfortunately as there's no single asset class that is looking rosy. If I were to say a very coarse average is that sophisticated institutional investors have de-leveraged their portfolios across all assets and are likely to be trading only higher frequency (that is intraday, but not necessarily microsecond) risk and few people hold anything long term.
Furthermore, I believe it helps to think of instruments in two terms: linear and convex. Linear instruments are like vanilla equities, index futures, bonds etc. Convex are various options, variance swaps etc. E.g. you may be still hanging on to some bets on energy going up by holding the futures, but you'd have bought some deep out of the money puts in April with the expectation that the current energy prices are what is termed "demand destroying". E.g. near term prices can further rise indefinitely on supply shock problems, but at some point the actual consumption will be destroyed and this can cause prices to crash down even if supply doesn't return. So you'd end up with a complex portfolio that has both linear and convex sensitivities and is difficult to characterize simply as "long energy, short equities" or similar.
Currently, there's a fair bit of convex exposure. This results in second and third order effects and feedback loops: if people hold too much convex exposure, then significant moves in the underlying price will trigger exponential moves in the convex instrument prices, which require people to do exponentially larger rebalances in the underlying - as counterparties need to hedge.
All these things currently combine into very unstable market conditions. What is different from the market instabilities between 2008 and 2020 is that now there are no policy tools to buttress this. Central banks have but two options: do nothing, or tighten conditions.
Most of the outlook is thus a mixture between recession or stagflation. My personal view is that things will eventually recover. That's what always happens. From a sufficiently long term perspective, the 1920s recession is just a blip. For my personal retirement savings, I'm just continuing with buying regular smaller amounts of equities across the globe. In this sense, I'm bullish on humankind (we'll prevail).
