Tom Holland

Abacus | A columnist confesses: I nailed belt and road, Hong Kong stocks not so much

From bitcoin to Huawei, Tom Holland takes stock of 2018 and comes clean about his crystal ball hits and misses

Reading Time:4 minutes

Why you can trust SCMP

Tom’s forecast for Hong Kong stocks was a little rosier than the reality turned out. Photo: Dickson Lee

Tom Holland

Published: 11:30am, 24 Dec 2018Updated: 5:20pm, 25 Oct 2020

Newspapers, complained the British prime minister Stanley Baldwin in 1931, enjoy “power without responsibility – the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages”.

The influence of the press is greatly diminished since Baldwin’s day. Yet there remains an uneasy feeling that newspapers, and newspaper columnists in particular, get away with far too much, writing whatever ill-informed nonsense pops into their heads without ever being held to account.

So with 2018 drawing to a close, and Abacus now more than 100 columns old, this seems like a good time to look back over the last year or so to assess how my analyses have panned out, and how my forecasts have withstood the harsh test of time.

Reviewing 2018’s calls, the first thing that stands out is a forecasting fail of epic proportions. In the last week of January, with Hong Kong’s benchmark Hang Seng stock market index up 10 per cent since the beginning of the year, I predicted that “the rally has further to run”.

The reasoning was sound enough – as far as it went. I argued that the fears of international investors that China would suffer a crippling financial crisis were grossly exaggerated. As a result, they were underinvested in the Hong Kong market. When they woke up, Hong Kong-listed stocks would play catch-up.