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Thoughts

Avoiding (Some) Future Risks in China Stocks – Useful Lessons from Alibaba

Alibaba (BABA, 9988 HK) listed in the U.S. on September 19th 2014. Those who secured an allocation at the IPO price paid U$68.00. Others could have bought when the stock opened that day at U$92.70. The majority of today’s holders though paid a long way north of both these prices and now, with the stock […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Employee Treatment and Stock Price Crash Risk: Evidence from China

Since 2010 a widely accepted index of employee satisfaction has been available in China from CSR-analysis service provider Hexun.com. Using this information Professor Xu Xixong (et al.) from the School of Economics and Business Administration at the Chongqing University set about finding out if there was a relationship between Chinese firm stock-price crash-risk and happy […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Submarine Cables and Container Shipments: Two Immediate Risks to the US Economy If China Invades Taiwan

The attack on a gas pipeline in Europe recently reminds there are a lot of assets that run under oceans, and top of them, that are all also vulnerable. Christine A. McDaniel and Weifeng Zhong of the George Mason University – Mercatus Center, have had a closer look at Taiwan in this regard focusing on […]

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Thoughts

NESCAR Watch – The Final Word: Timeless Lesson Taught To New Generation

I first wrote in April 2021 about the dangers of investing in New Economy Speculative Complex And Related, or NESCAR stocks (Slow Pile Up So Far). I followed that up a year later with an update (Ample Scope for Further Significant Losses); and here’s the last word. This is a short note because potential for […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Evaluating Environmental Benefits from Driving Electric Vehicles: The Case of Shanghai, China

Feng Wei (et al.) from the Shandong University has taken a snapshot, 2018, of the largest EV-adopting city in China, Shanghai, to try and calculate the benefits of EV introduction. The paper is filled with fascinating observation of which one is an aside noting not all EVs are equal in terms of their environmental benefit. […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – The Effect of the U.S.–China Trade War on Chinese Corporate Innovation: A Curse or a Blessing?

Leona Shao Zhi Li (et al.) from the University of Macau claims the work highlighted today is “..the first comprehensive study to examine the impact of [An] adverse foreign trade policy shock on innovation responses in the source country,..”. I’m sure this is correct, but it’s sad to note only recently has data on this […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – The Characteristics of Chinese Psychological Needs and Their Correlations to Political Attitudes

Researchers (in the West) pinned down a long time ago the business of knowing what ‘type’ you are and then inferring political (and all sorts of other, social, religious and etc.) leanings. Nearly all of that work though has been conducted in Western democracies and Xiaoxiao Shen, a doctoral student at Princeton University, wondered if […]

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Thoughts

Growth-Investing – A Bad Idea Of Late, Is Likely To Continue To Be So, For Several Years

Today’s a holiday in Hong Kong so I thought I’d spend some time to catch up with how the New Economy Speculative Complex And Related (NESCAR) sector has been doing. To remind, my go-to indicator is an index compiled by Goldman Sachs in 2021 of highly valued loss making companies which I wrote about in […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – China’s Financial System and Economy: A Review

In a piece for the Annual Review of Economics (a publication by academics, for academics, about what other academics are up to) Zhiguo He of the Booth School of Business and NBER and Wei Wei of the Becker Friedman Institute (both Booth and Becker Friedman at the University of Chicago) review the literature on China’s […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Chinese Regional Planning Under Xi Jinping: The Politics and Policy Implications of the Greater Bay Area Initiative

In an ‘Occasional Paper’ from the Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center Jason Jia Xi Wu (a Shenzhen native) dissects the Greater Bay Area (GBA) Initiative for what it reveals about central planning in the Xi-Era. His conclusions are not encouraging. It’s a long and dense piece but the short summary, I think, is this: Central […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Retail Investors and Momentum

Last week I looked at a paper highlighting a ‘persistent-anomaly’, the happy-staff effect. This week I look at another paper featuring another persistent (at least in the U.S.) anomaly, momentum. The U.S. market for many years has rewarded investors who buy things that have gone up (because they reliably go up more, true) and sell […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Employee Satisfaction and Long-run Stock Returns, 1984-2020

First, a relevant aside. If you were to pour water rapidly into a bath of sulfuric acid I can tell you what’d happen next. It’d also happen to someone else doing the same thing and at any time in the future (BTW, please, NEVER DO THIS!). Chemistry is therefore a science. Results of experiments can […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Does the market reward meeting or beating analyst earnings forecasts? Empirical evidence from China

It’s generally believed firms who regularly meet or just beat earnings forecasts must be manipulating earnings to achieve this. Which makes sense, right; but is it true? Guqiang Luo (et al.) from the Australian National University took a close look at 1,821 Chinese firms reporting between 2004 and 2019 to see if there were reliable […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Does Tax Uncertainty Affect Corporate Innovation? Evidence from China

From researchers Wanyi Chen from the SILC Business School at the Shangahi University and Liguang Zhang at the Sichuan Agricultural University here’s the summary-answer to the question ; yes, “..tax uncertainty significantly inhibits corporate innovation, and its influence channels operate mainly through corporate financing constraints and managerial shortsighted behavior.” That sounds commonsensical, but as they […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – How Can Robot Investment Assistant[s] Help: Collecting Information or Providing Advice? Evidence from China

Robot Investment Assistants (RIAs here, often Robo-Advisors elsewhere); me? Huge fan. As the basic principles of sound investment can be codified and easily applied in most situations what could be better than an algorithm (or suite of them) providing the novice investor with unbiased and proven-successful good-sense tips? The paper today from Huimin Ge, Huihang […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Millet, Rice, and Isolation: Origins and Persistence of the World’s Most Enduring Mega-State

The work highlighted today from James Kai-Sing Kung (et al.) from the University of Hong Kong is clever but I found it unsatisfying. In it, he and his collaborators attempt to explain why China has been a persistent mega-state for so long. What gave rise to large, organized civilizations across the world was clearly agriculture, […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Trump, China, and the Republicans

The author(s) of today’s paper-in-focus, Ben Li (et al.) from the University of Massachusetts, cite an earlier paper from 2012 to highlight the fact that U.S. China-bashing isn’t new. “Reagan repeatedly criticized President Jimmy Carter for establishing diplomatic relations with Beijing. Bill Clinton excoriated the “butchers of Beijing” in the 1992 campaign and promised to […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Is There Hope After Despair? An Analysis of Trust Among China’s Cultural Revolution Survivors

[This piece caught my eye as the effects of the global responses to COVID are going to leave deep scars across the social fabric of all societies affected. This study reminds just how long the effects of a societal trauma can persist.] Zhiming Cheng (et al., but from other Aussie institutions) from the Department of […]

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Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Government Control and the Value of Cash: Evidence from Listed Firms in China

There’s an ongoing debate in the academic literature as to whether government control of a company is a good or bad thing [Yes, really]. It’s a topical question as investors in government connected Chinese property companies are probably having a better time of it than those in wholly private entities. Investors in China tech stocks […]

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Thoughts

Slow Recovery, Surely or Quick Recession, Maybe?

The world’s two largest economies offer different scenarios for stock investors into the second half of 2022; one can now either: a) invest in an uncertain economy where recession may occur; but if it doesn’t an ongoing reckoning of profligate and inflationary government policies, deleterious to corporate earnings growth, will continue. Or, b) invest in […]