Chinese stocks: it’s utter carnage

An
extreme cycling enthusiast performs a stunt before falling into
the East Lake in Wuhan, Hubei province, China.
(Photo by Wang He/Getty Images)

If you thought the losses on Wall Street were massive overnight,
take a look at the scoreboard below of how Chinese stocks were
faring at various points on Thursday:

• Shanghai Composite 2,583.46, −142.38, -5.22%
• SSE50 2,390.50, -103.55, -4.15%
• Shenzhen Composite 1,306.69, -5.52%
• CSI300 3,150.21, -4.00%
• CSI500 4,350.11, -6.04%
• Hang Seng 25,437.85, -3.83%
• USD/CNY 6.5973, 0.12%
• USD/CNH 6.9389, 0.22%

Utter carnage, right?

The benchmark Shanghai Composite Index has tumbled 5.22% to
2583.46 by 9 a.m. Thursday, London time, leaving it at the lowest
level in four years.

It’s now lost 27.3% from the year-to-date high struck on January
29, and is currently on track to record its largest one-day
percentage decline since February 25, 2016.

Shanghai
Composite Weekly Chart.
Investing.com

Like the benchmark, all other mainland indices are getting
smoked, especially small-cap stocks.

The CSI 500 — comprising of the 500 largest companies by market
cap listed in Shanghai and Shenzhen — has fallen over 6%,
outpacing losses of more than 5% for the Shenzhen Composite and
ChiNext Indexes that are dominated by tech stocks.

In what sums up the session so far perfectly, the SSE 50 —
containing the 50 largest stocks by market cap listed in Shanghai
— is currently outperforming with a decline of only 3.33%.

Hong Kong’s Hang Seng is also in the wars, nursing a decline of
3.83%.

Despite the sea of deep red in stocks, the Chinese yuan has only
weakened fractionally against the US dollar as at the time of
writing.

Chinese stocks will resume trade at 4pm AEDT.