Posted:2007-6-5|Source:Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business|No. of Views:
We're sure that you're all sick and tired of hearing about the Chinese stock market, but since we're struggling bloggers, we get vicarious thrills by talking about things that people with money do. Stocks in China took a slight tumble on Friday, amid more concerns that stock capital gains taxes were in the works. Everyone is still debating whether or not the stock market is a bubble or not, but some analysts say that whatever market corrections come won't have a hugely deleterious effect on the economy either in China or abroad.
More interesting, to us, are the stories of the ordinary Chinese people that are discovering how to play mahjong on a global scale. A survey done in Chengdu found that 20.6% of investors "don't really understand the market" and 46.7% put their entire savings into the market.
Even more mind-boggling is the story of Changsha man Yong Fei (咏飞). The 28 year-old set some kind of record by starting out, on October 31, 2005, with 70,000 RMB, which he managed to increase, by hook or crook, to 20 million RMB a mere 320 days later (February 27, 2007).
The article claims that on the single day of May 31, 2007, Yong Fei managed to make a cool 9 million RMB. We're not sure how believable that is, if only because it's not clear that the reporter corroborated the information, and was instead just going on what Yong said to someone else in conversation.
Yong Fei caught the craze about a decade ago, and throughout the tumultuous years has had some big losses. He quit his job, would barely eat (in order to save money and keep an eye on stock prices), broke up with a girlfriend, had a falling out with his father. But he was determined, in the end, to ride the market to riches, and in 2005, he got his big break. Now he's become something of a minor celeb. And he's still keepin' it real by doing most of his work at an internet bar, especially which he chose because it has a fairly fast connection. Yong's been dubbed the "god of stocks" (股神), and as you can see from the picture above, he's not too comfortable with his newfound media fame.
