The China A-share Market is Definitely a Rollercoster-The Question Is, Are We On the Way Up or Down?

We've finally returned from the May holiday

here in China. For all the credit China gets for working hard, and much of it is well deserved, there are three different times during the year when the entire country takes a whole week off. As a beneficiary of this policy I cannot complain because it provides ample opportunity for travel. It just cannot do much for productivity. Think if the entire US was off for a whole week three different times during the year. I cannot even think of a time where the entire country takes two days in a row off. Maybe a little lack of productivity is what you want when you are aiming to emply 1.3 billion people. Creating that many jobs in a super productive environment would be a challenge for anyone. I guess that is why when we go to department stores, there are 15 people ready to help.

Anyway, we are back and the the pent up demand for A-shares is evident. I guess retail investors didn't spend all of their money during the May holiday on stuff they probably don't need (an estimated $550 million was spent in Shanghai alone over the 7 day holiday). The Shanghai Composite Index is already up 2.6 percent for the day sitting at about 3941, yet another all-time high (yawn).

China is definitely the wild wild East and its domestic A-share stock market is a rollercoaster. The question is, are we on the way up or down. If we are on the way down, as is commonly asked at the Grand Canyon, how far is it to the bottom? Are we in for a Beowulf-like plunge? I think the above charts says it all. I'll leave it to you to draw your own conclusions. Buyer beware!

Why Chinese Entrepreneurs Rock!!

On a recent trip to Thailand, I was reminded over and over again why Chinese entrepreneurs or even just businesspeople in general, rock. I spent the May Holiday (essentially Labor Day in China) running around the island of Phuket just off the coast of Thailand. I was doing everything one would expect in such as locale: jet skiing in the ocean, island hopping (yes, I did see the location where The Beach was filmed, see the attached picture), snorkeling, getting buried in sand, buying some great T-shirts, drinking pinnacaladas, getting sun burned, eating great Thai food and just being a bum. My only regret was missing the opportunity to see a Thai boxing match and riding the token elephant, but that is what second trips are for. I really questioned whether or not it made sense to return to the chaos.

We can all agree Thailand is the quintessential tropical location. It rains almost every afternoon in Thailand. During the last night of my vacation, the rain forgot to stop and continued on into the night. It must have rained, and rained hard, for 8 hours straight. The water level in the street rose to my mid-calf. I wasn't afraid of melting, actually I rather enjoy the warm rain in Southeast Asia; I just didn't want to be drenched from head to toe when I went to eat dinner or into a shop to buy something. The toe part of that equation was already a lost cause, so I had only my head to keep above water. So, doing what I always do when it rains in China, I looked for the wave of people that suddenly appear on the street hawking umbrellas from $1 the second precipitation begins to fall. In Thailand, these people were nowhere to be found.

Maybe that one instance was an anomaly and not representative of how things usually are, but I was thinking to myself the whole time how this would never happen in China. In China, there would be 5 people standing in front of me with boat loads of umbrellas of every color imaginable undercutting each other with price wars to sway me in their direction. Maybe this simple example is a microcosm of why the Chinese economy continues to churn and grow at torrid rates year after year. Chinese entrepreneurs are enterprising people that look for opportunities at every turn.

In another example, I was walking through the shops on the beach just wasting time and money. I noticed some really cool paintings that looked very Thai to me, of Buddas and the like. I really wanted to buy one to put in my apartment, so I asked the shop owner about the price. He said, 7000 Baht (~$200 USD), without flinching. I laughed but he argued the merits of the price with me, reminding me over and over again the paintings were done by hand. I thought, "I can find something ever similar to that in China for 1/10th of the cost," so I politely told the guy I would think about it. He just let me walk out the door.

I could see they were actually doing the paintings in the shop, but, oddly, I saw the same paintings in shop after shop after shop. I wanted to know how he was getting at the $200 price, so I indiscreetly asked one of the guys doing the paintings how long it took him to do one. He said 2-3 days. I returned to the shop owner, wanting to judge his honesty, and asked him the same question. He answered "one week." So, not wanting to buy from that guy, I moved on.

I returned to a shop I had visited the day before where a Nepali girl (most of the store employees were from Nepal, Burma and India) had waited on me. She was there again, and I asked her about the price of the painting. The night before she had said 3000 Bhat, which was looking more and more like a reasonable price after a bit of market research. I told her if she came down to 2500 Bhat (~$71 USD), I would buy it. She used her cell phone to call her boss and came back to me with a down face. She told me her boss would only come down to 2800 Bhat. Realizing this was only the beginning of the negotiation and that I needed to talk with the decision maker, I asked her to call her boss back and let me speak to him. She did, and I worked him down to 2500 Bhat. When we were packaging the painting up for the trip back to China, knowing all of these paintings had to come from the same source, I asked her what her boss's cost was. Her best guess was 2000 Bhat. I could live with them making an 800 Bhat profit. I walked passed the first store owner and just lifted the packaged painting up. He knew I had bought elsewhere. I again thought to myself, a Chinese entrepreneur never would have let me walk out of his store without a heated negotiation. I guess they can afford to be more choosy in Thailand.