00:00Paul, should we start with Korea? It's so topical because we're still working our way through the ADR for SK
00:07Hynix.
00:08That's going to come to market tomorrow, of course.
00:10But the KOSPI is only, I would say this with recent history in mind, only moving by six tenths of
00:16one percent.
00:16That seems like a small move for the KOSPI. What's been going on?
00:21A small move, Anna, but I do think that it's a market that it's worth starting with in this conversation.
00:26I remember it entered a technical bear market in yesterday's trading.
00:30So the fact that it's finding some stability today should be reassuring for investors.
00:37I think there's a couple of things to keep in mind when you're looking at it.
00:40Number one, the biggest contributor to the upside there was SK Hynix, which, you know, as you're saying,
00:46after that huge ADR sale in the U.S., which may be around $25 billion worth, seven times oversubscribed as
00:54well.
00:54It shows that there's still some enthusiasm, surely, out there for the two large memory chip makers in South Korea.
01:01I think the other thing to pay attention to is foreign buying.
01:05We've seen foreign buying for two straight days in a row now.
01:07What I thought was really interesting was some analysis that was done in our Macro Man column by Cameron Kreese
01:12yesterday,
01:13where he sort of dug into it and he was saying, you know,
01:16are foreign investors a good judge of which way the market's going?
01:19And he found emphatically, yes, in the four weeks after foreign investors adding to their holdings of Kospi,
01:25the market tends to rise an awful lot more than if they're selling.
01:30Paul, give me the broader context as to what is happening with the Asian tech story.
01:34We're definitely getting some rotation.
01:38Definitely getting some rotation.
01:39But actually, there seems to be a little bit more enthusiasm returning across the board today.
01:44So we definitely saw the Nikkei back to outperforming the topics in Japan, which is a positive AI sign.
01:52But I think the China stack is something that's really worth paying attention to here.
01:55So we have Jopu rising as much as 22 percent today.
01:58That's a maker of large language models and software.
02:03It did a four billion dollar capital raise and still managed to push higher.
02:08So that shows you that people are really interested and excited about that company,
02:12which has been able to raise its token prices repeatedly as it rolls out new models.
02:17So some enthusiasm there.
02:19Next week, we get a very large IPO, CMXT, which CXMT, I beg your pardon, which is a chip maker.
02:25So we'll see how that goes.
02:27But overall, in the Chinese stack at the moment, there seems to be some energy and enthusiasm pulling the market.
02:33Yeah, just briefly, Paul, what's the latest on China?
02:35We've had some inflation inflation clues and we're working our way towards some growth numbers.
02:42Yeah, that's right.
02:44So I thought it was really interesting in the PBOC's most recent sort of readout of its policy meeting.
02:49It was talking about with a new phrase about structural divergence.
02:52It's basically recognizing the K-shaped recovery, the K-shaped economy in China right now.
02:58And I think that that's starting to come through again in that inflation data, which was a miss on the
03:02downside.
03:03China desperately trying to, you know, kind of get inflation going through the economy again, get growth going through the
03:09economy.
03:09What it does have is strong exports, and that's holding up.
03:11That's the upside of the K.
03:13But the downside of the K, of course, is the depressed consumer.
03:16So next week, we have a lot of data, including retail sales.
03:18It'll be worth paying attention to see what that tells us about the economy.
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