From Bloomberg, January 15:
Some of the exchange‑traded funds heavily owned by China’s so‑called national team saw record outflows on Thursday, a development that aligns with broader efforts to temper the stock market rally.
The Huatai-Pinebridge CSI 300 ETF saw a record 20.2 billion yuan ($2.9 billion) of outflows on Thursday, the most since the fund’s inception in 2012, according to Bloomberg-compiled data. Outflows in other funds, such as the E Fund CSI 300 ETF and ChinaAMC CSI 300 ETF, also hit records.
In total, the national team, a group of state‑backed institutional investors, sold about $10 billion worth of ETFs on Thursday, according to an estimate by Bloomberg Intelligence.
The team’s trading motives may hint at official attempts to rein in a rally driven by AI enthusiasm and earnings optimism. Their selling also comes a day after regulators unexpectedly tightened margin financing, a step investors largely shrugged off as a tactic to target speculative trades in certain tech names.
“It looks like the National Team is selling and making an effort to cool the market down,” said Jiang Liangqing, managing director at Zhuhai Greenbamboo Private Fund Management. “While speculation has been rampant and trading excessive in some parts of the market, selling ETFs may still help in cooling that and won’t create a conflict of interest.”
Turnover in a basket of eight national team ETFs tracked by Bloomberg surged to 40 billion yuan in the first hour Friday, more than double the average full‑day level over the past year. The benchmark CSI 300 Index rose as much as 0.9% before trimming gains....
....MUCH MORE
On the one-month chart it does look like the big index is rolling over.
And from the State newspaper, China Daily, January 14:
China raises minimum margin requirement to lower stock market leverage
China has a real problem: Every time the People's Bank or the government inject liquidity/stimulus it goes into non-property assets.
Mssr.
