Karl Marx famously said that Religion was the opiate of the masses, while legendary Liverpool Football managers Bill Shankly said Football “wasn’t just a matter of life and death, it was more important than that”.

Currently, equity markets in general are stuck just below their long term moving averages and, as we might put it, look to be ending a bear phase but not yet entering a bull phase, similarly gold, while credit and Bonds are steadily recovering – albeit still well down on the year.

“China has a tendency to ‘test’ new policies on certain regions before going ‘nationwide’ with them. Thus, it is entirely possible for, say, the Greater Bay Area, including Hong Kong, to see an earlier easing of Covid restrictions than other parts of the country. Indeed, watching the recent spike in the prices of Macau casino stocks, the locals are clearly looking at things this way.”

With the end to Mutual Fund tax-related selling in October and the closing out of the CTA hedge fund short positions ahead of Thanksgiving in November, the equity markets finally managed to put together two back to back positive months, reinforcing the seasonality trends of this time of year and taking negative returns from the 20’s to the teens for most investors.

There is a tendency in the west to see China as an authoritarian monolith – in contrast to the supposedly highly accountable democratic west, albeit only those with the shortest of memories can look at the current protests against Covid taking place in China and think them somehow unique.