Sometimes, however, I get the itch to tell the boss that we might do a better service to the property investing public if we published it only once a year and then only to say: 'It's okay, folks. You're doing fine. Don't worry yourself so much. The market's come off a bit recently [may come off a bit soon] but it will come back.'

My own rule in these matters is that, if worry about any of my investments wakes me up in the middle of the night, then that investment gets sold first thing in the morning. I reckon that sleepless nights are a poor return on my money. I like something I can live with and forget about occasionally when I have other things on my mind.

And despite the price gyrations for which the Hong Kong property market is so notable, I think it generally falls into this class of investment. The price changes mostly in relation to what people think a certain standard asset is worth at any one time and that has mostly to do with external events we do not control. The standard of the standard asset changes much less.

We certainly do not suffer from the huge scale of overbuilding and irresponsible financing that plagues the property market in the United States at the moment.

We could not have that overbuilding when the average usable floor of a home in Hong Kong is still only about 400 square feet, this in a society with an average gross domestic product per capita of US$30,000, one of the world's wealthiest. We could not have it anyway when completions of new flats are near a record low.

And we have never had irresponsible financing of the sort that has created the subprime crisis in America. Even at the worst of the property slump of recent years, the three-month mortgage delinquency rate stood only at 1.43 per cent. It is at present at 0.07 per cent. Housing markets in America and Europe have never seen such low numbers.

It carries throughout our statistics. Mortgages in negative equity now amount to a total value of only HK$1.6 billion, less than 1 per cent of the figure five years ago and over that period the market has also broadened enormously with transactions in the secondary market now five times as great as in the primary market.

My own personal favourite for the underlying conditions of the market is one that I spent some time working out on a spreadsheet for the chart below. It takes government figures on bands of discount rates for new mortgages to arrive at an estimate of the average mortgage rate for new mortgages.

That's the red line in the chart. The blue line shows you HSBC's best lending rate over the same period. We are still at record-low mortgage rates and record-high discounts from BLR. In other words, professional financiers think property is such a high-class asset that they fight each other off to lend you money for it.

But will mortgage rates now go up again? They probably will, and eventually this will have an impact on property prices, as will higher oil prices and, among other things, reduced sales in America this year of Christmas rubbish produced in the mainland. Things had been looking so good for the Hong Kong property market until very recently that it's about time for some reversal of fortunes.

And if you're clever enough to pick the exact turns of the market, to know for certain that now is the top of the market and to sell your holdings, to be able to recognise the bottom of the market when it comes and buy back into it, well, then you're a good deal more clever than I am and you should do it.

I can't do it. I have never been able to make it as a top and bottom picker. I've tried but mostly it was me rather than the market that was picked off.

So if the outlook is now clouded and the interest rate cycle has turned, you will still find me holding on to my flat and my slums. I'm happy with what I have, I can sleep with it at night and that's good enough.