IN years gone by Hong Kong was not exactly what those in polite society might have called 'the right sort of market'. Fun to flirt with, but not the type one would entertain for a weekend in the country.
Today, of course, things are very different. After all those self-improvement classes courtesy of the Securities and Futures Commission accents have been spruced up, backs straightened and we are now running with a very different crowd.
In fact, last year we became one of the darlings of the world's financial establishments.
We were feted and wooed, and our best chaps offered almost unlimited access to the in-crowd on the jet-set circuit through all those convertible bond road-shows.
It seemed a happy tale of a market pulled up by its boot-straps, so when we spotted a certain Dennis Levine (yes, the one at the centre of the Ivan Boesky insider-trading ring) knocking around Hong Kong's financial district last week our eyebrows were raised.
Mr Levine suffered a US$11.6 million (HK$89.5 million) fine and three years in prison back in 1987 for establishing the insider trading ring described by the sentencing judge as 'an entire nest of vipers on Wall Street'.