Stock Connect sees 2 trillion yuan traffic, with Ping An the big winner

More than 2 trillion yuan has poured through the Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect scheme in the year since it was launched.

Investors inside and outside mainland China have bought and sold 2.066 trillion yuan in stocks, according to data from the Hong Kong exchange, mostly in the insurance, banking and consumer sectors.

While some purchasing of mainland stocks by select international companies had been previously allowed through programmes such as the Qualified Foreign Institutional Investor scheme, begun in 2002, the Stock Connect was the first time retail investors on the mainland and worldwide could engage in cross-border trading.

Northbound investment from international investors into Shanghai dwarfed traffic heading out of the mainland, with only 591 billion yuan worth of southbound transactions in the first year, compared with 1,475 billion yuan heading north.

On an average day, about 226,000 trades flow back and forth between Hong Kong and Shanghai, with average turnover of about 9.1 billion yuan, according to HKEx statistics.

International investment in mainland Chinese stocks grew steadily from November last year, peaking in June. But following the mainland’s stock market crash on June 12, buy trades had plunged to 41 billion yuan by September, down from a high of 116 billion just three months earlier.