On April 20th, the CEO of ICBC, quoting data from internal sources, claimed that the estimated scale of shadow banking in China is around RMB15-20tn, which is relatively small in scale to GDP when compared to shadow banking in more developed countries.

In addition, the leverage used in the Chinese shadow banking industry is not as large as other countries, so he argued that it is not necessary to worry about systematic risks in the Chinese financial system, but he still admitted there are non-systematic risks caused by shadow banking industry.

However, many independent financial analysts say that the scale and risk involved of shadow banking are underestimated and there might be increasing number of events happened in 2014 around shadow banking in China.

In recent years China's mobile internet has been developing quickly and had a great impact on people’s lives. The official figures show that by the end of 2013, China had approximately 500 million mobile internet users, a 25% increase over 2012. With the penetration of smartphones in China more users prefer to use mobile devices to deal with many daily tasks. 

Over the next week, we'll be publishing a number of articles looking at the upcoming Alibaba IPO which could be the largest tech IPO ever. Today we look at the financials filed with the SEC. 

On April 14, 2014, Shanghai Stock Exchange-traded *ST Changyou was delisted, becoming the first state owned company to be delisted in A-share markets.

As US SEC’s investigation on large investment banks recruiting Chinese governmental officials’ and SOE senior managers’ children is going further than any such probe before, the dark side of foreign companies operating in Chinese markets is gradually being exposed to the public. However, that probably doesn’t come as a surprise for the Chinese public which has known and suffered from the ‘unwritten rules’ for a long time. 

Last month, Shanghai Chaori Solar Energy Science & Technology became the first company to default in China's bond market when it failed to make a full payment on the issued debt. This shows that the Chinese state is not going to back up even big private borrowers. Several other companies are also on the verge of debt insolvency, according to local media sources, with government debt also on the rise.

After couple of months of low trading volume and little news, BTC China, previously the largest and still one of the most prominent bitcoin exchanges in China has moved the goalposts for other exchanges (and the PBOC!) by launching the first physical Chinese Bitcoin 'ATM' at the IC Coffee Shop in Zhangjiang Hi-tech Park in Shanghai on Tuesday the 15th. In addition to the physical ATM, BTC China released a new mobile Web appcalled “Picasso ATM”, which is actually the main theme of the ATM launch.

On China's supposed bitcoin 'd-day', April 15th, BTCChina launches Shanghai ATM what could be the country's first bitcoin ATM. Kapronasia was onsite on launch day and will have an update tonight on our experience using the ATM.

The latest statistics about the A-share markets illustrate the main industries that QFII funds invested at the end of 2013, according to data from 1334 listed firms’ 2013 annual reports. The banking industry is the most attractive industry for QFII investors, taking about 1/3 of the total new shareholding volume with the steel industry and automobile industry ranked the 2nd and the 3rd.

The banking industry makes sense because of the relatively low valuations. The steel industry is currently suffering in China, so QFIIs likely have confidence that Chinese urbanization and development of automobile industry will continue. For automobile industry, as Chinese government intends to push hardly on new energy vehicles especially electricity-powered vehicles, could pose an interesting QFII investment allocaction.

High frequency trading (HFT) has roughly been in existence since 1999 in the US as execution times have shortened from several seconds to millisecond or even microseconds due to advanced trading technologies and a general demand for increased speed. Figures from August 2013 showed that in the global FX market, HFT took approximately 40% of the total trading volume, within which, almost half of the volume happened in the spot market. For the global futures market, HFT volume represents about 40% of the total volume. In the equities market in the US, HFT volume took approximately 73% of all equity order volume. Typical strategies executed by HFT traders are trading ahead of index fund rebalancing, market making, ticker tape trading, event arbitrage, statistical arbitrage, news-based trading and low-latency strategies.