Mr. Shangkong | Investors shocked to discover fund managers' private views
After a conversation between a fund manager and an analyst was leaked, investors digested private opinions at odds with their public comments
The past week proved to be a scandalous one for the mainland's stock market.
A private conversation about the market outlook between one of the mainland's most respected analysts and an influential fund manager was secretly recorded by a third party and then leaked to the public.
The impact? What a shock!
Investors were shocked not only by the bearish views of Cheng Dinghua, an award-winning strategist at Essence Securities, and Xu Xiang, a fund manager at Zexi Investment, but also by how different their off-the-record views were from what they and many of their peers said publicly.
In the conversation, secretly recorded by a salesman who later leaked the recording to the public through the internet, Cheng said he expected the benchmark Shanghai Index could easily fall under 2,000 points next year if inflation rebounded.
What's even worse, both he and Xu expected major institutional investors to sell-off stocks in the last few weeks of February, whereafter the market would enter a months-long correction period.
For public consumption, most fund managers have been talking in recent months about the high possibility of a return of the bull market under China's new leadership led by Xi Jinping.
