China Investors See Silver Lining for Stocks as Bonds Tumble (2)

(Bloomberg) -- For some China investors, the outlook for bonds is becoming a compelling reason to buy stocks.

December’s debt selloff, the biggest in six years, may just be the start as policy makers crack down on speculative trading, according to HFT Investment Management Co. With the Shanghai Composite Index one and a half years on from its own bubble bursting, and fresh from its steepest annual decline in five years, fund managers and strategists say stocks are finally offering some relative value.

“We prefer equities to bonds in the first half,” said He Qian, a Shanghai-based portfolio manager at HFT, which oversaw 189.4 billion yuan ($27 billion) of assets as of Sept. 30. “The market expectation is that inflation will continue to recover, and that’ll benefit risky assets in the initial stages. Plus, there are other positive factors including improving corporate earnings.”

Like their counterparts around the world, China’s investors are grappling with the re-emergence of inflation as a threat to debt returns and a tailwind for equities, with factory-gate prices rising last month at the fastest pace in five years. Plus, other economic reports from industrial profits to manufacturing support the argument that equities have an edge, and policy makers’ efforts to boost money-market rates are spoiling a long-followed strategy of using borrowed cash to buy bonds.

Still, in the first weeks of January, neither asset class is proving a fertile ground for investors. Government bonds have declined, with the 10-year yield jumping 25 basis points to head for the biggest monthly advance since March 2015. The Shanghai Composite has edged 0.6 percent higher, after a 4.5 percent tumble in December that was the most in 11 months.

The big shift began in August, with the People’s Bank of China guiding borrowing costs higher as a nine-year credit binge aiming at boosting economic growth pushed China’s debt-to-gross domestic product ratio to 247 percent. The central bank began extending the tenors of its open-market operation loans, which halted a record bond rally and pushed a Bank of America Merrill Lynch index of Chinese debt down by 1.7 percent in December.

The benchmark 10-year sovereign yield climbed to a 16-month high of 3.37 percent on Dec. 20, after touching a record-low 2.64 percent in August. The earnings yield for Shanghai shares is around 1.3 percentage points higher than that for corporate bonds due in a decade. The figure shrank to 1.19 percent in December, which was the smallest gap since August 2015.

China’s gross domestic product expanded 6.8 percent in the fourth quarter from a year earlier, more than the estimate of 6.7 percent in a Bloomberg survey, Friday’s data showed.

The yield on 10-year sovereign debt due November 2026 was unchanged at 3.265 percent on Friday, data compiled by Bloomberg show. That compares with a 200-day moving average of about 2.89 percent. It’s a bearish sign when the yield rises above its long-term moving average, said Hao Hong, Hong Kong-based chief strategist at Bocom International Holdings Co.

(Updates stock move in fifth paragraph.)

--With assistance from Ling Zeng and Xize Kang To contact Bloomberg News staff for this story: Helen Sun in Shanghai at hsun30@bloomberg.net. To contact the editors responsible for this story: Richard Frost at rfrost4@bloomberg.net, Robin Ganguly

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