From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:
Make no mistake, investors didn’t need any more reasons to be bearish on Chinese equities.
Mainland markets are veritable casinos dominated by retail investors who until last summer, were enthralled with the prospect of easy riches in an environment where shares only seemed to know one direction: up.
All of that changed last June when a dramatic unwind in the half dozen backdoor margin lending channels that helped to fuel the rally triggered an epic rout that became self-fulfilling once the retail crowd (which accounts for 80% of the market) became rip sellers rather than dip buyers.
Since then, successive efforts on the part of the CSRC to stabilize the situation by pouring CNY1.5 trillion into A-shares has met with limited success as periods of calm are interrupted by violent bouts of selling like those we saw earlier this month when China tried and failed to implement a circuit breaker.
Throw in the ongoing yuan deval fiasco and there’s every reason not to be involved in Chinese stocks.
But when it rains it pours, and now, analysts say margin calls on SCLs [Stock Collateralized Lending] are the next landmine that may pose a “systemic risk” for China’s battered markets.
“Some companies that had pledged shares as collateral for loans are now faced with a stark choice – dump them under pressure from impatient brokers and banks and book a loss, or stump up fresh cash or other assets to make up for the difference in value,” Reuters writes.
This is a rather large problem. Over half of all listed companies have their shares pledged. As BofA notes, “1,411 A-share companies have had some of their shares been pledged for SCLs by their major shareholders, representing 50.2% of the total number of A-shares. The value of stocks pledged for SCLs has been rising consistently – from Rmb2.36tr on 1 July 2015 to Rmb3.05tr by 1 Jan 2016, i.e., up by 29% in 2H15.”
In short, the steep decline in margin financing paints an incomplete picture when it comes to understanding how much leverage is in the system.
To continue reading: China’s 3 Trillion Yuan Margin Call Time Bomb Is About To Explode
