IN recent weeks, experts have been busily pontificating about how the Tracker Fund would receive a poor response.
Fund managers and analysts trotted out all manner of arguments to buttress their predictions of a lack of interest in the Government's great share sell-off.
Some pointed out that the Hang Seng Index, on which the fund is based, is outdated and includes some stocks of little long-term value. Others noted how local investors have never previously shown much interest in funds of this type.
But such supposed experts seem to know rather less about the SAR than they do about spreadsheets. Even before the long queues for application forms a week ago, it should have been clear to anyone even slightly in touch with what Hong Kong people were talking about that the fund would attract the enthusiastic response it did.
The pundits have been left with egg on their faces, after retail and institutional investors submitted applications for at least three times the original indicative offer size of $10 billion worth of units. When the final figures are released later this week, the true level of over-subscription may turn out to be even higher.
Although officials have so far refrained from publicly rubbing salt into their critics' wounds, they will be privately chortling at having so spectacularly proved them wrong. Not for the first time, an unelected Government has demonstrated a remarkably populist touch.
Indeed last week was a particularly good one for the administration, which also had its critics on the run on a second front. With opinion polls showing up to 70 per cent public support for the agreement to build a theme park on Lantau, even the Democratic Party had to be cautious in attacking it.