【英语财经】中国投资者仍对A股态度冷淡 Chinese investors still shy of A-shares

Despite the sharp falls of recent months — continued with last week’s lurches — A-share prices still look expensive and Chinese retail punters aren’t keen to get back into the market. Appetite among Chinese households for buying A-shares has dropped back to levels last seen in the depths of last summer’s carnage.

In a monthly survey of Chinese consumer sentiment conducted by FT Confidential Research, a research service at the Financial Times, just 19.3 per cent of respondents said last month that now was a good time to buy A-shares, versus 45.5 per cent who said it was a bad time to do so.

FTCR’s index of investors’ appetite for buying A-shares rose to 47.3 in November from August’s record low of 36.4, suggesting that sentiment was improving in the wake of government efforts to stabilise the stock market. (The further the index moves above 50, the greater the appetite for buying A-shares; the further below 50, the lesser the appetite.)

Chinese share prices were reasonably stable in the final two months of 2015 but the sentiment index weakened in December, showing households were losing faith, before plunging in January to 36.9.

The best to be said now about China stocks is that the government has largely got out of the way of falling prices.

The Shanghai Composite Index’s falls last week, including a 6.4 per cent drop on Tuesday, took the benchmark to its lowest point since the end of 2014. There could be further to go.

This year’s 25 per cent drop can be seen as part of a much-needed deflation of a debt-fuelled equities bubble that officials irresponsibly allowed to inflate over the end of 2014 and the first half of 2015. Regionally, only the Shenzhen Composite index has been a worse performer this bruising year so far.

The government may not have learnt a lesson about intervening in the market last summer — when brokerages were infamously coerced into publicly defending the 4,500 level — but its bungled attempt to introduce a circuit breaker system at the start of this year appears to have done the trick, for now.

That circuit breaker was quickly suspended, with the regulator arguing that China had little experience managing such market mechanisms and needed time to “further organise related research and improve the methodology, widely gauge opinion from all sides and improve the related mechanism”.

In the meantime, the “national team” of state institutions has receded, curtailing its more visible attempts to prop up the market through share purchases, and is letting prices come down.

Nonetheless, the overhang of last year’s botched interventions will continue to cast a long shadow over the market in 2016.

To the extent that fundamentals matter in China’s liquidity-driven stock market, the Shanghai Composite still looks pricey. Even after its recent falls, the index trades at 14.4 times earnings, versus South Korea’s Kospi, which is on 13.8 times earnings, the Straits Times index’s 11.2 times and just 8.5 times for Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index.

The Shanghai index is even more expensive if the big state banks, which trade at price/earnings ratios in the low single-digits, are stripped out.

The Shanghai Composite’s PE ratio was just 11.7 times in the week of November 21, 2014. That was when the People’s Bank of China surprised with an interest-rate cut, a move that arguably marked the shift from a stock market rally to a full-blown speculative frenzy.

David Wilder is Principal, China at FT Confidential Research.

尽管最近数月经历了暴跌（上周继续下挫），但是A股价格看起来仍然昂贵，中国散户仍不愿回到股市。中国家庭对于购买A股的欲望已降至去年夏天股灾时的水平。

英国《金融时报》旗下研究服务部门“投资参考”(FT Confidential Research)对中国消费者情绪所做的月度调查显示，上个月仅有19.3%的受访者表示当时是购入A股的好时机，有45.5%的受访者认为不是。



去年11月，“投资参考”编制的投资者对购入A股的兴趣指数由8月时36.4的创纪录低点上升至47.3，表明投资者情绪在政府采取稳定股市的举措后有所提升。（该指数高于50越多，表明投资者购入A股的兴趣越浓；该指数低于50越多，表明这种兴趣越弱。）

2015年最后两个月，中国股市相当稳定，但是该情绪指数在12月有所降低，这表明中国家庭正在失去信心。随后，该指数在1月跌至36.9。



眼下，关于中国股市最多只能说，中国政府对股市下跌已经基本上不再干预了。

上周上证综指再次下挫（其中上周二下跌了6.4%），跌至自2014年年底以来的最低点，可能还会进一步下跌。

今年迄今A股下跌25%，可以认为，这是债务催生的股市泡沫所亟需的去泡沫的一部分（中国政府官员不负责任地放任股市在2014年底和2015年上半年吹起了泡沫）。从地域来看，在这个惨不忍睹的一年，到目前为止，只有深证综指的表现比上证综指更糟。

中国政府或许没能从去年夏天的经历中学到关于干预市场的教训（当时券商耻辱地被迫公开捍卫4500点的点位），不过今年年初引入熔断机制的失败尝试似乎使中国政府得到了教训——就目前而言。

熔断机制设立后很快被叫停，监管者称中国在管理此类市场机制上几乎没有经验，需要时间“进一步组织有关方面研究改进方案，广泛征求各方面意见，不断完善相关机制”。

与此同时，“国家队”已退出（其通过购买股票支撑市场的更明显尝试偃旗息鼓），任由股市下跌。

尽管如此，去年以失败告终的干预遗留下来的问题，将继续给2016年的股市蒙上巨大阴影。

虽然中国股市由流动性驱动，但基本面因素依然对它非常重要，就这一点而言，上证综指看上去依然昂贵。即使是在近期下跌后，上证综指的市盈率仍然为14.4倍，相比之下，韩国综合股价指数(Kospi)的市盈率为13.8倍、新加坡海峡时报指数(Straits Times index)为11.2倍、香港恒生指数(Hang Seng)仅为8.5倍。



如果将大型国有银行（市盈率仅为较小的个位数）剔除，上证综指还会更加昂贵。

在2014年11月21日那周，上证综指的市盈率仅为11.7倍。当时中国央行意外降息，此举可以说标志着中国股市由反弹行情转向全面投机狂潮。

本文作者为英国《金融时报》旗下“投资参考”中国区主任

译者/马柯斯