It’s always amused me that Taiwan has a tourism subindex (but no tourism). What we have here is a sentiment-driven self-fulfilling prophecy. What happens is someone in the government says “direct links” then all the punters go “ah, that means the tourism sector will go up” and they buy in. Because they all buy in, the tourism sector does indeed go up. Then people start to get out taking their profit, and the index goes back down.
The next day there is news about oil prices going up. All the punters go “ah, that means the solar panel shares will go up” because its a well-known phenomenon that every time the price of crude oil goes up, Europeans and Americans rush out and buy billions of dollars worth of solar panels (I kid you not, that is the “rationale”). So the punters buy solar panel shares. Because they all buy in, solar panel shares do indeed go up. Then people start to get out, and they go back down.
The next day, HTC decides to buy Dopod, one of its distributers which everyone knows is majority owned by the lady in charge of HTC, but this is a big “secret”. So, this is a toughie. Is this a good thing, or a bad thing? The sentiment-driven Taiwan retail investor egged on by market gurus (i.e. insider dealing stock rampers) decided it was a bad thing, because the only plausible stock-moving story was that HTC selling phones under its own name in Asia would somehow conflict with its deals with European and American phone companies. This is because the retail investor does not care to know anything about the company he is punting. If you are a broker, you have to work with what you’ve got. The punter probably knows HTC makes phones, and that it sells them to European and American phone companies. The punter will not know anything about Dopod being a brand name used only in Asia. Or care. The other thing for brokers is, knowing the company is worth at least NT$1,500, pushing the share price down a bit means even more commission on the way back up again to fair value. Happy days. Sell" So, the “Gao Jia Goo” myth was resurrected. This, if you haven’t heard of it, is a stock market phenomenon in Taiwan where all stocks of around NT$300 and above are linked together and traded as a block, regardless of the lack of similarity between them. So, when the HTC news was digested by the market (it took a while because the market is not used to dealing with fundamentals-related news) not only did HTC wet the bed, but Motech fell too, despite having nothing whatsoever to do with or in common with HTC other than its price is over NT$700.
Around bonus time, there will be rumours of securities companies making a fortune, bolstering the share price nicely, and lining pockets. Whilst the sales guys make their own money, the other 90% of the company that does nothing needs to justify its bonus! I mean, where’s the next Lexus coming from?
If the government was this bent there would have been a civil war years ago.
Gotta go, some share prices need manipulating.
That’s the Taiwan stockmarket for you.