Flying too high

IF YOU were a Chinese worker you could have spent the past year toiling to earn a living. Or you could have bought some shares and sat on the sofa (see ). Chinese equities have been on a bull run of epic proportions. The CSI300, an index of the biggest mainland stocks, has more than doubled over the past year. That looks positively anaemic compared with ChiNext, a market for Chinese startups which has tripled in 12 months; let alone with shares in Qtone, an online-education company that gained almost 1,300% between its listing early in 2014 and the middle of this month. Its own directors have warned investors to be wary of “ignorant hype”.The signs of overvaluation are everywhere. Stocks listed on the Shenzhen exchange, home to most tech firms, have an average price-earnings ratio of 64; for those on the exchange for small and medium-sized enterprises it is 80. (For most stocks a P-E ratio above 25 is considered expensive.) ChiNext is now priced at nearly 140 times last year’s earnings, a valuation that puts it in the same league as NASDAQ, America’s tech-heavy exchange, at the height of the dotcom frenzy. Companies whose shares are listed in Hong Kong and in Shanghai are trading at a 30% premium in the mainland, near a four-year high. Some are twice as valuable in China, even though mainland money can now more easily slosh southward into the Hong Kong market.