Everett Collection
Get ready for a “Hill Street Blues” reference… That sound you hear? It may be the deflating bubble in some Chinese stocks.
The market scribblers at Standard & Poor’s crunched the numbers on Chinese Internet and solar companies with more than $100 million in market value. They found that on average, their collection of once-hot companies have lost half their value in the past year, after increasing in price by one-and-a-half-times over the past year. S&P wrote:
“Looking at this data, we think it would be fair to say that the Chinese companies might have been in a bubble that burst, especially when considering that over the same period, the average stock in the S&P 500 only fell 14% (from its 52-week high), after rising 60% (from its 52-week low to its 52-week high).”
Market cognoscenti like our MarketBeat buddies have written about the “risk off” phenomenon — that is, investors are jumping out of anything perceived as economically sensitive or risky, as doubts grow about the health of economies worldwide. That goes double for anything tied to China, both because of hiccups in that country’s raging growth, concerns about inflation there, and generalized anxiety about the soundness of some Chinese companies trading in the U.S.
For signs of the damage, check out RenRen. The “Facebook of China” had a hot IPO a month ago, and then promptly fell off the table. Its shares are down nearly 14% today, to $8.07. That’s nearly half the company’s IPO price. Ugly.
Even U.S. Internet giant Yahoo has taken a glancing blow. S&P notes that Yahoo has taken a whack because of its indirect ownership of China-based online payments company Alipay. S&P’s says the bursting bubble has caught up some promising stocks. S&P singles out Baidu, the online search company, which S&P said has an attractive valuation after a stock-price swoon.
Usually the pop culture references are Deal Journal’s wheelhouse, but we’ll leave S&P to make its own “Hill Street Blues” warning to investors. “Be careful out there.” |
发表于 2011-6-13 17:11
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