BEIJING/SHANGHAI: Now that Shanghai Disneyland has been given the go-ahead, many will be asking the question whether others will make as much money from the $3.6 billion project as has already been made by market speculators.

Few potential projects could have been so subject to frenzied market activity as the prospect of Mickey Mouse and his friends arriving on Chinese mainland soil.

Any latest intelligence on whether the Chinese government was or was not going to give the theme park its approval could be guaranteed to unleash furious market activity.

Stocks that could benefit from the project experienced often unusual movements in their share prices, with many investors undoubtedly profiting as a result.

Many believe some of the snippets of news that often seemed subtly placed in the media had all the authenticity of a Disney fairy tale.

But whether the market was just vulnerable to rumors, or people or groups of people were deliberately manipulating the market on a huge organized scale, might never be known.

Certainly, some people got very rich from all the millions of yuan staked on mysterious and often inexplicable share movements.

Tu Jun, an analyst with Shanghai Securities, said the proposed Disney park was a dream come true for speculators.

The combination of a world-famous brand with only vague details about the actual project provided a perfect vehicle around which to create rumors and counter-rumors in order to make lots of money, he said.

"This type of speculation is usually very sensitive to related news reports and events. It is not so much the reality, but the expectation that spurs market reaction," Tu said.

Tu said there have been other examples around the world, although few to match this scale.

"The phenomenon is quite common in the markets. We call it thematic investment or speculation," he said.

A wild ride

Some of the wildest fluctuations in the market were witnessed only a few days before last week's announcement by Disney and Shanghai's municipal government.

On Oct 27, the Securities Times, a Shenzhen-based newspaper, carried a one-sentence report on its website saying that the Disney project had passed the verification stage set by the country's top decision makers and would soon be officially announced.

This briefest of reports prompted a spectacular rally in the stock market only minutes after it was published.

Jielong Industry Group Corp Ltd (see Chart 1, page 6-7), a Shanghai-listed company, which was believed to own property close to the park's proposed site in Shanghai's Chuansha township, suddenly jumped 10 percent, the daily trading limit in the Chinese market.

Other companies with connections to the Disneyland concept such as Zhonglu Co Ltd (see Chart 2), Cimic Tile Co Ltd (see Chart 3) and Lujiazui Co Ltd, also soared by the same amount, while the benchmark Shanghai Composite Index fell by 2.83 percent to 3021.46 on that day.

These were among the last volatile oscillations in a whole catalog of, at times, difficult to explain movements dating back to 2006, when the first reports of a Disney theme park began to emerge.

Zhonglu and Jielong have been at the center of much of the speculation. Zhonglu saw a consecutive rise in its stock price of 10 percent for nine days in November 2008.

Not everyone has been happy about these strange and volatile movements with small investors, in particular, often finding themselves on the losing end of market activity.

Huang Feng, an investor based in Shanghai, said he now finds it too much of a fairground ride to hold his Disney-related related stocks any longer.

He invested 300,000 yuan on Oct 12 to buy 30,000 shares of Xiamen Prosolar Real Estate Co, which runs a villa project close to the expected site for Disneyland.

Soaring shares

"Its shares surged at a pace beyond my expectation," said Huang, who works for a publishing company in Shanghai.

He sold his holding on 0ct 22, when the stock had made a return of 17.4 percent, fearing any gain would be wiped away in the next speculation.

"I was so scared about its growth rate at that moment. I felt the risk was too high to continue holding it," he said.

At times during the three-year saga of speculation surrounding the project there have been some highly unusual movements in share prices

On May 15 this year, Jielong's price was frozen in a straight line at 15.4 yuan for 70 minutes, suggesting to some that there were unusual forces at work manipulating its price.

"It is very likely that a number of accounts were manipulated by speculative investors at the same time to avoid regulator investigations," said Li Ran, a 26 year-old investor who works for a securities firm in Beijing.

"Apparently, only a highly manipulated market could have such a strange performance," Li said.

Daryl Guppy, a leading trend analyst who is an expert on market movements and a keen watcher of Chinese markets, said the pattern was unusual, but he doubted there was manipulation on this occasion.

"Sideways movement on high volumes shows agreement about the value. It's common in a market that is waiting for a news release. It is like the calm before a storm, " he said.

Volatile cocktail

Guppy said the Disney project and the often-erratic nature of China's stock markets were always going to be a volatile cocktail.

"The patterns have been unusual, but not dramatically out of the ordinary for China trading," he said.

Guppy believes some of the sudden movements in share prices, as highlighted by the share graphs, were classic examples of rumor speculation.

He points to the behavior of Zhonghlu's shares when it rose 10 percent a day for nine consecutive days from Nov 19 2008.

"The chart-1, chart-2 and charts-3 show a clear correlation of the Western idea of 'buy the rumor and sell the news'. There was a fairly standard price and volume (of shares traded) rise taking place. People becoming increasingly aware of the potential of the rumor," he said.

Guppy said the whole saga of the Disney speculation created perfect opportunities for arbitrage, where investors can take opportunities between price differentials between markets.

Time zone follies

News surrounding the Disney project often emerged in the United States, when all but the most financially active were fast asleep in their beds in China.

"You have news released in different time zones, which creates perfect opportunities for arbitrage. Those who got access to the information earlier could act upon it when the market opened in Shanghai. In the modern world, there is no way you can stop these arbitrage opportunities," Guppy said.

Many believe the media itself has played a huge part in adding to the speculation and destabilizing the market through the drawn-out affair.

To give just one example, Shanghai Securities News reported on Aug 8 that the Pudong local district authority had settled major issues surrounding the project with Disney.

This triggered a strong market reaction. The price of companies such as Jielong plunged sharply after consecutive hikes in the previous few days.

This seemingly perverse behavior was following a classic Chinese pattern of how "stock prices hit the ground when rockets are in the sky", not dissimilar from the Western concept of buying on the rumor and selling on the news.

"The supportive news reports were often released at a time when the market had reached its peak," Li Ran, the Beijing investor, said.

"A lot of small investors like myself sensed that possibly some institutional investors were using media organizations to spread rumors so as to misguide us," Li said.

Guppy said it is difficult to establish whether someone was deliberately trying to manipulate the market by planting false leads and making sure they appeared in some influential publication at key moments.

"The off-again, on-again nature of this project adds to rumor-driven price rises. If we say a rumor is deliberately planted, that is a type of market manipulation, but it is very difficult to prove. You see this very often," Guppy said.

All the Disney speculation has brought into question whether Chinese markets need tighter regulation.

Some of the unusual trading patterns seen recently might have led to investigations by the authorities on Wall Street or in London.

Li Jianfeng, an analyst with Shanghai Securities, wonders, however, whether more exacting regulations would have protected smaller investors from the volatility.

"Regulators will and should investigate obvious price manipulation. But it is often hard to stop it in the first place, because investigations often come after the manipulation which has already resulted in losses for investors," he said.

Missing the ride

Very few have shared in the Disney stock market bonanza. Just a few kilometers away from the Shanghai Stock Exchange in the Chuansha township in Pudong district, local residents have failed to benefit from any of this speculation.

It is far too early for any signs of construction. As the trees sway in the late autumn winds, the site has a desolate look with only a modest cluster of farmers' homes in sight

Min Rongchun, a villager who ploughs a small plot in Zhanghang, one of the villages that make up the area, said he has yet to be touched by any of the Disney glamour.

"We've heard about the coming of Disneyland for over a decade, but Mickey Mouse has yet to affect our daily lives," Min said.

Like other farmers, he is aware that he could be the recipient of a financial compensation package.

Already, most of the farmland around the proposed site has been fenced off using green mesh wire.

"It's been much talked about that we can get higher compensation from the government for Disneyland usage if the lands are fenced, and everyone in the village is making sure they have fences," a farmer surnamed Liu said.

James Macdonald, head of research at estate agents Savills in Shanghai, said the economic benefits for those living in the area might not prove to be that great.

"There will likely be some uplift to the residential market in the immediate area from services and facilities that are constructed in order to support Shanghai Disney. There may also be a larger uplift to property values for projects where residents are relocated for construction of these facilities," Macdonald said.

"This impact is still limited by the location, as it is far from the city center. Residential values will still be significantly lower than in inner parts of the city," he said.

There also has to be a question about whether the Disney park will prove to be the real commercial success that all this speculating has seemed to imply.

Parita Chitakasem, research manager at research organization Euromonitor International's Singapore office, said there is already tough competition in China from attractions such as Window of the World in Shenzen, JinJiang Amusement Park and Beijing World Park.

"Disney will be up against some very large players," he said.

The real winners in all of this could, indeed, be the speculators. The question is whether they will go away now that the project has been announced.

Many believe the values of companies directly linked to the project such as those with land banks will deter any more of this activity.

"They no longer have the value for investment. The development of the land will soon be taken over by the government once the project enters the first-phase construction," said Li from Shanghai Securities.

"In fact, we have already seen some of the shares of companies that have been part of the Disney speculation, but which do not have any real business in the project, start to show weak performance," he said.

Li said the only companies that are likely to do well from the project are the ones in it for the long term.

"Companies that could possibly lead the next round of growth are those in infrastructure, tourism, transportation and the retail sector which will likely gain real benefits from the project," he said.

It may be that China's many speculators will now have to look for their next target.

There will be few to match the roller coaster stock market ride provided by all the Disney Fantasia.

(China Daily 11/09/2009 page1)