Chinese stock punters bet on a Harris win with ‘Haersi’ as US election spurs meme trading
A vacuum-flask maker rises and falls with polls favouring Harris, while an aviation software company gets a Trump bump
As millions of Americans head to the polls for the neck-and-neck election between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, some Chinese stocks with similar-sounding names have experienced ups and downs.
After a Des Moines Register poll over the weekend indicated that the vice-president was leading by 3 percentage points in Iowa, a Republican-voting state in recent elections, the stock of a Chinese company making vacuum flasks rose 10 per cent shortly after the market opened on Monday. Its name, Haersi, bears a resemblance to that of the Democratic candidate.
At the same time, shares in another company, Wisesoft, which provides aviation technology and whose Chinese name, Chuanda Zhisheng, distantly suggests ‘Trump victory’, dropped by 10 per cent.
Such absurd reasons for market moves highlight structural problems in the Chinese stock market, which pose challenges for conducting long-term value investments, analysts said. The retail investors who trade China’s A-shares – yuan-denominated stocks available on the mainland – are famously driven by policies, rumours and tenuous connections that are often irrelevant to the fundamentals.
“Essentially, it indicates that the A-share market is a speculative market, driven by emotions, although it is hard to decipher how exactly these emotions resonate with the US election,” said Wen Kejian, a Hangzhou-based political and financial researcher.
The fluctuations of Haersi and Wisesoft continued on Tuesday as mixed polling results emerged, with the Harris stock falling and the Trump stock rising. The stocks, both with market capitalisations of more than 4 billion yuan (US$563 million), closed down 2.2 per cent and up 8.7 per cent, respectively.
