It is October again and it is time for Hans to head back east. This time I am going to Shanghai, and not Hangzhou as in October 2010 and 2011. I will present some research I have done on news and stock market volatility (with a Chinese flavor) at Fudan University.
I am curious about going to Shanghai for many reasons. One reason is that I want to see how the economical/financial situation has changed since last year. I am looking forward to getting under the skin of the Chinese economy again and to talk to professors at Fudan about the situation. I have been negative about buying Chinese stocks for a couple of years now and I wonder if it, possibly, could be time to change my opinion. Those who have followed my blog for the last two years might recall my strong bear attitude to Chinese stocks (but not on China in general):
in October 2010 in the blog Go east, boys and girls! I wrote
“...I am not advising anyone to buy a sizeable piece of China corp. right now. As obvious as it is that China is a giant in the making, equally obvious it is that it is all one giant bubble at the moment. The stock market is inflated,...” and
in October 2011 in the blog Back from China! I wrote
“...I have stressed the bubble tendencies in China in earlier blogs, see for instance "Go east, boys and girls!", and it is possible that we might see the start of the great deflation of this bubble now....”
Since then the broad Shanghai Composite Index has lost almost a fourth of its value! See the chart above. At the same time FTSE All World is up 5%. OK, what about the future? Well, when I come back from China I will hopefully be back with some comments on this and other things!