At the first “Hong Kong Financial Forum” held recently, Chief Executive Li Ka-chao highlighted Hong Kong’s financial strength and mentioned Hong Kong’s new financial measures, including promoting the inclusion of RMB counters in Southbound Trading and promoting the RMB exchange rate in Hong Kong stocks. Measures such as pricing transactions will further strengthen Hong Kong’s status as an offshore RMB center. In addition, it will also expand regional cooperation and contribute to the construction of the “One Belt, One Road”. Asia’s first Saudi Arabian ETF, an exchange-traded fund, is also listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Its asset scale is the largest among similar products in the world. This type of cooperation is enough to prove that Hong Kong is an important value-added platform for global financial integration.
After the Saudi ETF was listed on Wednesday (November 29), Turqi A. Al-Nowaiser, deputy chairman of the Saudi sovereign fund Public Investment Fund (PIF), said at the listing ceremony that the listing of the first ETF marked an important moment for PIF. He pointed out that Hong Kong is undoubtedly one of the most developed financial ecosystems in the world. He believes that Hong Kong is very important to the global financial industry, so he hopes to connect Hong Kong and Saudi Arabia through the launch of ETFs.
Whether it is the expansion of RMB-denominated stocks or the introduction of Saudi Arabian ETFs, these are major financial measures and are two keys to Hong Kong’s unique advantages. One is to develop into an important RMB trading center, and the other is to develop cooperation with the “Belt and Road” countries. Cooperation.
The government is working hard to promote the launch of RMB-denominated stocks or Saudi ETFs, but this is only the first step to success, and subsequent implementation is more important, which involves two important measures.
First, it is necessary to strengthen the transactions of related stocks and funds. Hong Kong is a free market. Many things happened naturally in the past. However, in today’s increasingly competitive world, many things will not happen naturally. Taking Singapore, one of Hong Kong’s main competitors, as an example, there is a strong push for various financial products, both overt and covert. As Deng Xiaoping famously said, whether the cat is white or black, the one that catches mice is a good cat. For these products to be successful, active transactions are the key. How to increase transaction volume is the KPI (key performance indicator) to measure success or failure.
Second, retail investors must be actively involved. Participants in the financial market are mainly divided into institutional investors and retail investors. Institutional investors mostly buy and hold and do not have many active transactions. Quantitative traders are the exception; retail investors are the main participants in day-to-day trading. They Through short-term trading, you can earn the price difference and greatly increase the trading volume. Quantitative trading in Hong Kong is far less developed than in the United States, and it is difficult to achieve it overnight. Therefore, how to encourage more retail investors to participate is a key factor in making these emerging investment products active.
However, in the past ten years or so, Hong Kong retail investors have become less and less interested in participating in the stock market. On the surface, this is because the stock market has performed poorly, but in reality, it is difficult to tell whether this is a chicken or an egg. It may be that there are fewer participants, the market is inactive, and stock valuations have fallen, rather than the decline in the stock market causing fewer participants.
One of the reasons for the shrinkage of retail investors in the Hong Kong stock market is that the Hong Kong Stock Exchange has done nothing to encourage retail investors to participate. The Hong Kong Stock Exchange is both a regulator and a listed company. It often focuses on institutional investors and ignores the needs of retail investors.
In the past, the regulations of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange required listed companies to publish their announcements in newspapers with one Chinese and one English. Later, the stock market leader Chang Mao and others objected, and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange eventually canceled this requirement. The media’s financial pages received significantly less advertising resources, and the media accordingly reduced the manpower of the financial pages, resulting in a substantial shrinkage in financial reporting. In addition, the media wants to provide real-time online quotations. The Hong Kong Stock Exchange charges the media an annual fee of more than one million yuan. How can the media have the motivation to provide free real-time quotations to retail investors? After the sharp decline in media coverage, it is not clear that the Hong Kong Exchange has done any other promotion.
If we reverse our thinking and vigorously promote publicity and encourage retail investors to participate, the Hong Kong Stock Exchange should not only charge the media high fees for information services, but should instead pay the media to do this and encourage the media to vigorously increase real-time quotations and Report more news about listed companies.
The conclusion is that in this new era of sudden change, the SAR government has responded quickly and has adopted a new mindset. It has changed from sitting around waiting for business to proactively grabbing business. It has also changed from focusing on the European and American markets to looking at the world and developing markets in the Middle East and other countries. market, and also increased efforts in RMB business. However, if the various execution agencies just follow the rules, the transactions of RMB-denominated stocks will continue to be sparse, and the trading of Saudi ETFs will be deserted, this will become a self-certifying failure.
In this era of competition for business, the fruit will not automatically fall from the tree for you to eat. Financial institutions must be alert. You have KPIs. First of all, we must work hard to promote the success of this Saudi ETF.
Lu Yongxiong
Taiwan’s blue KMT Hou Youyi and the White People’s Party Ko Wenzhe negotiated for more than 40 days on the “Blue and White Cooperation”, and finally broke through on November 24. Hou Youyi and Ko Wenzhe each found running partners to run for office, turning the “Blue and White Cooperation” into It ended in a farce.
The most dramatic incident occurred at the “Grand Hyatt Club” held at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Taipei last Thursday (November 23). It was the eve of the nomination and the “Blue and White Club” was on the verge of collapse. Ko Wenzhe asked Terry Gou to set up a club at the Grand Hyatt Hotel. Bureau, hoping that the Kuomintang Hou Youyi would conduct final negotiations, but the whole “Grand Hyatt Club” was more like a performance than a negotiation. Since Ke Wenzhe’s party asked reporters to wait at the scene early in the morning, when inviting Hou Youyi to participate in the meeting, they also put up an electronic clock to indicate the time of the candidacy. , the pressure on Hou Youyi is very strong. In the end, Hou Youyi first asked Ma Ying-jeou and Kuomintang Chairman Zhu Lilun to accompany him to the meeting. Later, he refused to negotiate in a secret room and demanded that reporters be present openly. In this situation, breaking up on bad terms is a destined outcome.
The break of “Blue and White” reveals several problems:
One, no one wants to play second fiddle. Although after the break, it was reported that Huang Shanshan, Ke Wenzhe’s core staff, was the one who strongly opposed Ke Wenzhe’s participation in the “Blue and White Alliance”. However, regardless of the two camps’ respective opposition to joint candidacy, the key is that neither Ke Wenzhe nor Hou Youyi want to act as deputy. This is the root cause of the incompatibility between blue and white. Some people say that the “Blue and White” negotiation is reminiscent of Game Theory, especially the coward’s game derived from it. Two people drive against each other in sports cars. The one who is afraid of collision and swerves first to avoid it is the coward. However, if neither of the two people are willing to be cowards and the two cars collide head-on, and everyone is killed, it will be like the current situation where the “Blue and White Cooperation” negotiations have broken down.
Second, the biggest beneficiary is the Democratic Progressive Party. The original intention of “blue and white combination” is that Lai Qingde of the DPP has always been leading in the polls, with more than 30% support, while Ko Wenzhe and Hou Youyi both have more than 20% support, so if blue and white do not combine, they will lose the election. If you stand for election, you will have a strong chance of winning. The biggest beneficiary of the collapse of “Blue and White” today is naturally the Democratic Progressive Party candidate Lai Qingde.
Although after the tie was broken, the Taiwan Public Opinion Foundation released a poll conducted before the tie was broken on Monday (November 27), indicating that Ko Wenzhe led with 31.9% support, a surge of 6.3 percentage points, while Lai Ching-te of the Democratic Progressive Party led the way with 31.9% support. Ranking second with 29.2% support, a drop of 0.5 percentage points, while Hou Youyi only received 23.6% support. Although it increased by 2.5 percentage points, there is still a large gap between support and other candidates. It shows that Ke Wenzhe is blue because of his blue background. Thanks to Baihe’s publicity, his popularity rose dramatically. However, the credibility of these polls in Taiwan is still questioned. The Taiwan Public Opinion Foundation also released party polls that showed that support for Ko Wenzhe’s People’s Party has surged. The blue media “United Daily News” used the four words “unbelievable” as its headline. Taiwan’s polls can be used as a reference but cannot be relied upon. The person who benefited the most from the blue-white divide is Lai Ching-te. It is said that Lai Ching-te’s decline in public opinion will help the DPP to push for votes.
Third, the assumption of rationality is invalid. As I said earlier, if we look at “Blue and White” from game theory, if both sides think rationally, they should be able to win, because whether Hou Youyi or Ko Wenzhe give in and act as deputy, they can eventually overthrow the Democratic Progressive Party. It is better for the party to come to power than to stand for election independently, which is likely to fail in the end. But when no one is willing to be a deputy and the negotiation breaks down, it becomes a gambling mentality, which is not a rational choice.
The discord between Blue and White also shows that Taiwan has no political leader, and the top leaders of both parties are unwilling to sacrifice for the overall interests. Behind this is a situation of “rational ineffectiveness”. This is similar to the thinking model of Ukrainian President Zelensky. Until the start of the Russia-Ukraine war on February 24 last year, as long as Zelensky chose to give up applying to join NATO and made a public commitment, the war would not be fought, but he chose to persist. Bet that Ukraine could defeat Russia with the support of the United States and the West, but now it has lost four points to a country. Therefore, the invalidity of Taiwan’s rationality hypothesis has profound implications. Don’t think that if the DPP continues to be in power, it will stop playing for Taiwan independence and avoid war. Many times politicians only look at short-term electoral interests and will not know how to stop when they rush to the edge of the cliff.
Lu Yongxiong
2023-11-29 10:06:20
#work #hard #promote #Saudi #Arabia #ETF
