How to Protect Yourself from China's Crashing Stock Market

How to Protect Yourself from China's Crashing Stock Market


Shah Gilani

Chinese stocks plummeted again yesterday.

The Shanghai Composite tanked 8.48% to 3,725.56, while the Shenzhen Composite fell 7% to 2,160.09. And the ChiNext, China’s smaller equivalent of the Nasdaq, fell 7.4% to 2,683.45.

Based on everything the Chinese government and regulators have done to stem the sharp sell-off in Chinese shares and pump them back up, the unexpectedly big drop yesterday, on virtually no discernible bad news, could signal a serious crash ahead.

U.S. and international investors need to understand what’s going on in China and position themselves to profit on a full-blown market crash there that could ignite global contagion…

The Sky Really Did Look Like the Limit

Chinese stocks were on a tear up to June 12, 2015. The Shanghai Composite soared 51% from the beginning of 2015 through June. It rose 134% in the past year. That meteoric rise was dwarfed by appreciation in the smaller Shenzhen index, which was up 173% over the past year, with a whopping 109% rise since the start of this year.

In spite of government cheerleading all the way up, spooked investors, for no good reason other than perhaps their own fear of heights and the economy’s slowing growth trajectory, began selling in mid-June.

And sell they did…

The Shanghai Composite, the big Chinese benchmark index where China’s biggest companies are listed, fell 32% in three weeks. From the market’s peak on June 12 to the early July lows, companies listed across China’s stock markets lost close to $4 trillion in value.

What looked like an uncontrollable freefall had to be met with government intervention; there was no other way to stem mounting losses caused by a negative feedback loop that happens when margin calls force market sell orders that push stocks down more, triggering further margin calls.

Master Manipulators Inflated Stocks… Then Had to Come to the Rescue

Frightened government officials and market regulators rushed to shore up the rapidly eroding banks of what had become the country’s focus – soaring markets.

Government cheerleading from politicos, market regulators, and the Communist Party-controlled China Daily newspaper advocated stock ownership and touted the Shanghai Composite’s rise above 4,000 as just the beginning of the bull market.

The cheerleading efforts were more than effective. Since the beginning of 2015, the China Securities Depository & Clearing Co. estimated new investors were opening up an average of 170,000 brokerage accounts a week.

The bad news turned out to be the new investors were mostly woefully undereducated speculators with no practical knowledge about stock trading or investing and a frighteningly large contingent of corporate executives who jumped into the markets with company capital, believing they could make more money riding the bull market than manufacturing goods in their slowing domestic economy and for a flat-lining global market.

If that wasn’t bad enough, almost all the “new” investors employed huge amounts of leverage, buying stocks on margin.

By April 10, 2015, a month before the markets turned sour, margin reached a record $264 billion. But, again, that’s not the worst of it. That margin calculation came from the China Securities Finance Corp., a government-controlled entity, under the watchful eye of China’s market regulatory body, the China Securities Depository & Clearing Co.

No one has any idea how much other margin was extended to speculators through China’s notorious shadow banking channels. Some analysts have estimated shadow margin lenders, charging above-market rates on loans backed by the value of inflated securities, could be equal to or higher than official margin loan calculations.

When the selling started, it created a cascade of sell orders, triggering a massive negative feedback loop.


Shah Gilani

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Shah Gilani is the Event Trading Specialist for Money Map Press. He provides specific trading recommendations in Capital Wave Forecast, where he predicts gigantic “waves” of money forming and shows you how to play them for the biggest gains. In Short-Side Fortunes, Shah shows the “little guy” how to make massive size gains – sometimes in a single day – by flipping large asset classes like stocks, bonds, commodities, ETFs and more. He also writes our most talked-about publication, Wall Street Insights & Indictments, where he reveals how Wall Street’s high-stakes game is really played.

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How to Protect Yourself from China's Crashing Stock Market

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