From Business Week:
Programs to eliminate non-tradable shares are part of what brought retail investors back to the mainland bourses. The Shanghai index is up 122%
About the time that executives at HSBC Holdings in Britain were opening their Christmas stockings on Dec. 25, markets in Shanghai were closing”with shares in ICBC, or Industrial & Commercial Bank of China, ending the day up 9.9%. That was enough to drive up ICBC’s market capitalization to $214.2 billion, in the process unseating HSBC to become the world’s third largest lender by market value behind Citigroup and Bank of America. On Dec. 26 its shares climbed another 5.8%.
That performance has helped drive the Shanghai Composite to a record closing high. The index is up a whopping 122% in dollar terms this year, while the smaller Shenzhen exchange is up 101%. The combined market capitalizations of Shanghai and the smaller Shenzhen Exchange now total $815 billion.[Full Text]
