Strong Will

Friderica Widyasari leads Danareksa Sekuritas to persevere amidst this year’s market turbulence and economic downturn.

- Robert Yota

This year did not start as ideal for most people with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic that has infected more than 4.3 million of the global population. The global economy has been experiencing a downward trend even before the start of the coronavirus in January, largely due to the ongoing trade war between China and the US.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) recorded the global real GDP growth rate at 3% last year, which is a drop from 3.6% back in 2018. Meanwhile, Indonesia’s growth in last year’s fourth quarter was recorded at 4.97% (yoy), which is a decrease from the third quarter’s 5.02%. With the rate of COVID-19 infections still on the rise, the further economic decline seems almost inevitable.

Consequently, the Jakarta Composite Index (JCI) suffered a weekly drop of 14.5% from 4,907 in to 4,194 in the third week of March and has forced the Indonesia Stock Exchange (IDX) to initiate several trading halts to prevent the index from dropping into more concerning levels. In comparison, the JCI decrease in March is still not as severe as the two worst JCI drops in the country’s history, which was the drop from 736 in June 1997 into 263 on September 1998 throughout the 1997 Asian financial crisis period that lasted for a year and the decline from 2,830 on June 2008 into 1,146 on November 2008 triggered by the 2007-2008 subprime mortgage loan scandal in the United States. Notably, the 2008 crisis resulted in bankruptcies of notable corporations that handled stock brokerages such as Lehman Brothers, MF Global, and Ambac.