To call the last three months a "rollercoaster" for Chinese equity investors would be to offer a hopelessly inadequate and comically understated assessment of what has truly been one of the most incredible examples of bubble blowing gone horribly awry in the history of speculative frenzies.
Make no mistake, the writing was on the wall all along and once it became apparent that around a third of the millions of new day traders China was minting on a weekly basis had an elementary school education or less [4], genuine concern turned to stunned amusement and the astonishment only grew once word got out that margin debt in China was quite literally off the charts [5].
In short, millions of semi-literate day traders had employed an unprecedented amount of leverage on the way to inflating a world-beating equity rally and would you believe it, not only did China not move quickly to curtail the frenzy, the PBoC actually began easing into a stock market rally for the first time in its history.
Now, as the ashes of the country’s scorched equity markets lay smoldering at the feet of the plunge protection national team which finally gave up on rescuing the market after CNY900 billion proved inadequate to arrest the slide, and on the heels of the PBoC’s latest effort to staunch the bleeding by resorting to yet more policy rate cuts, we bring you the full, annotated SHCOMP market and policy timeline courtesy of Bloomberg:
[6]
