Trying to talk investors down from the edge of panic when standing square in the face of a herd of their peers charging for the exits is the stock in trade of your average investment strategist. Mark Tinker at AXA Investment Managers does that by addressing eight key concerns in a new note entitled "Climbing the 'Great Wall of Worry'". Tinker makes the point that while many people do not believe Beijing's gross domestic product growth numbers, finding the appropriate proxy is not always easy - nor likely to give you the final number you have been used to seeing. "With an economy of almost US$11 trillion, bigger than Germany, France and [Britain] combined, why would we expect even 4 per cent growth, let alone 5, 6 or 7 per cent? Given the base effect, we should be happy with a sustainable 6 per cent [as the International Monetary Fund suggests it is] and focus on the shifting components," Tinker writes and then uses a nifty dataset on express parcel deliveries to do just that. "These are a useful indicator of internet shopping and have grown from two billion to 14 billion in the past three years alone. There are 670 million people in China online and most of them use their smartphones."
