In other words, there is no such thing as a market growing increasingly uncertain. A market is always uncertain at whatever price is posted in that market and the degree of uncertainty does not change much. Sit at any dealing desk for an afternoon and you will get the point.

And now let us consider the nature of developers. They are the ultimate speculators, although we shall rate them as one notch better than the shifty-eyed speculator villain of popular legend as they also organise the construction of our homes and workplaces, which that horrible villain does not.

But developers don't design those buildings. Architects do that. Developers don't build them. Contractors do that. Developers don't finance them. Banks do that. Developers don't sell them. Estate agents do that. What developers do is take the big speculative risk of the constant price uncertainty in the market for new buildings.

They now complain, however, that things are stacked against them. The government, they say, has been too tight on releasing land at auction and too demanding on price. In a recent spate of land auctions they have thus overbid and then the market sagged, which means that their margins are likely to be pinched.

Well, boo-hoo. Sorry, fellas, mostly you win big but sometimes you lose. That's the way the cookie crumbles; that's the way rookie fumbles. Tough luck. Find someone else's shoulder to cry on.

Let us, however, examine the complaint more closely. Until last year the government published regular quarterly statistics on developers' margins. Then it stopped doing so. I don't know why.

The red line in the first chart sets out those developers' margins as a percentage of total building and construction activity in Hong Kong for 40 years until March last year.

Two things stand out about this. First, these margins are high. This is understandable in one way as we are talking of profit margins on turnover periods of three years or more. Of course these are higher than supermarket margins on turnover periods of a month or two. Even so, they are notably high.

Second, the dips in the margin tie in precisely with the big crunches in the property market, pretty much as you would expect. And, pretty much as you would expect, the margin has risen again with the market's recovery since 2003.

The green line says that I think the trend is intact. The latest developers' whinge is likely to be one that in two years' time you won't even remember. They overbid at auction for a few months in present hindsight. So what. Sometimes the public purse gets to win.

I also have my doubts about their complaint that the government has recently been too tight in releasing land. For land auctions specifically this may have been true. The red line on the second chart certainly indicates it.

Look at the green line on the chart, however. It shows you the amount of land released for residential construction through private treaty grant. Over the past 10 years this has been three times as much as all land released through public auction and recently it has rocketed up again.

Strange that, you may say. Private treaty is meant for land granted at a discount to hospitals, schools and other community services. Why for residential, why so much more than through public auction and why did this suddenly begin to happen in 1995 when we were previously more restrained in private treaty grants?

Good questions. Hello there, you at the Lands Department, why? Do we have here another example of the post-handover civil servant scorning the marketplace to take all decisions into his own hands?

Let it be. My immediate point is only that land supply is in fact coming through again, except not through the traditional channel. Forget that dip in 2003. We had a big scare that year but supply is now rising again and this developers' whinge is overstated.