Thoughts On The Snakes And Ladders Equity Markets

29/06/2015 by

This post was written for www.hnworth.com, a site targeting high net worth individuals in Singapore.

Have fun reading !

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I do not think anyone would get past this weekend without talking about China’s weekend rate cut, the Gre-ferendum or the SCOTUS ruling on same sex marriage, in an increasing order of importance.

And I am sure about 1.3 billion people will wake up with smiles on their faces on one side of the globe, jamming up the phones and internet to check the opening prices on the stock markets, even if people are turning pale in Greece as ATMs are emptied before the weekend is even over.

There is nothing financially significant about the SCOTUS ruling and the Gre-ferendum is likely to freak financial markets out in a big way when markets open at 4 a.m. (SG time) in New Zealand until they close on Saturday morning (SG time) with New York into the day of voting on 5 July.

CHINA

We have talked about China to death in the past months through their astronomical ascent to a 7 year high and simultaneously descent in the past 2 weeks, chalking record weekly losses that have not been seen in 7 years as well.

SHCOMP Index Weekly Chart

Thank goodness for the Chinese, stock trading is just monkey business, as we have written about before, another study has proven that it does not take a lot more than monkeys to beat hedge fund performance this year ().

Take a quick look at Asia’s IPO statistics.

Early June harkened even better results, with all 144 of China’s IPOs jumping an average of 539%. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-03/china-s-hot-ipo-market-lures-273-billion-to-2-billion-offering

REST OF ASIA

Yet China’s success is really bad news for the rest of Asia and America because it meant no business coming the way of say, SGX which had, by this time last year, garnered some S$ 950 mio of initial public offerings compared to the S$38.4 mio we have so far.