About

[Comments? Contributions? Feel free to email me directly at nial@chinadream.asia.]

The China Dream blog is written by me, Nial Gooding. A little over 30-years  ago I moved to Japan from the UK to initially continue a career in bond sales.  That job turned into a bond trading position and finally a brief stop in fixed  income structured products. Stocks had become a keen hobby by the time, in 1990 after six fun years, I chose to move on. After a brief return to  the UK I found myself in 1992 in Hong Kong as an equity salesman with the capital markets arm of Barclays Bank, then called BZW, and I’ve  lived here ever since.

My first encounter with China came in 1987 when, with friends from Japan, we visited Shanghai. Pudong was a green field on the other side of the Huangpu, there were no taxis, as foreigners we were forced to use Foreign Exchange Certificates that inflated all prices by 40%, restaurants outside hotels were scary (the ones in hotels not much better) and, it being the fall, everywhere was cold, cold, cold! On entering China at that time you had to declare anything of value (camera, walkman etc.) and on leaving your form was collected to make sure you took out what you’d brought in (remember back then people were making good money sneaking Levi jeans into Russia?). I’d lost my bit of paper and whilst trying to leave the airport officials looked like they might make me the subject of their morning’s amusement by holding me and making me miss my Tokyo return flight. At this point the frustration of having just endured the expensive holiday from hell proved too much and I snapped. At that time a lot could be achieved by being an irritating foreigner and, deciding I was going to be hard work, I was released. When I got back to Japan I had only this advice for people who wanted to know if they should make a China trip; under no circumstances!

Two years later I was in China again. This time on business. I remember the date exactly, June 14th 1989, and I was with colleagues visiting the Central Bank in Beijing. We knew something about the events of June 4th; but of course not as much as we know today. We’d almost canceled the trip due to personal safety concerns but went regardless. At lunch our host Mr. J.G. Yang began ‘I suppose you’d like to know something about what just happened here?’ After some nervous throat clearing we invited him to carry on. ‘To be honest, we were hoping you’d be able to tell us a little as we don’t know much either’ he said. He and his team went on to explain that they didn’t have access to CNN or any other external media. At that time Bloomberg was a fancy bond calculator not a news service and besides, as J.G. explained, their terminals had been held up by one of the Ministries of Making Life Difficult who believed they were trying to bring in TV sets, then subject to significant import controls.

My point in going back in time above is to remind myself, and you if you need it, just where China has come from. How in such a short period of time it’s gone from poor, sad and scary in dangerous combination to the powerhouse we see today. With the benefit of 20-20 hindsight we now know that the late 1990’s, believed by many at the time to be an end, was in fact the beginning of the greatest economic transformation achieved by any nation in the history of the world.

It’s been my privilege to have enjoyed a ringside seat at this Greatest [Economic] Show on Earth and from 1992 until 2010 I pursued a sell-side career in equity sales which ended with a ten year stay at UBS working with their multi award winning China equity team. I picked up a CFA Charter along the way and from 2010 have fulfilled a long held ambition and moved into the world of institutional asset management. Specializing in? What else; China stocks.

These days, when not writing the odd ramble for China Dream, I’m managing The China Dream Absolute Return Fund working with the Hong Kong and China specialist boutique GCIS Limited as a Senior Fund Manager. From 2012 to 2018 I was a Member of the Listing Committee of the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong and I’m presently a Member of the Listing Appeals Committee.

I have no doubt China will continue to progress and remain for the rest of all our lives the most important economic story on the planet. The Greatest Show on Earth is set to run and run.