Talk of stock market boom immature

When the Hong Kong stock market, and everything else, so it seemed, was booming in the 1990s, there was a lone voice in the bubbly financial community prophesizing doom. Of course, we all know that Dr. Doom, a nickname he earned for his steadfastness, was eventually proven right, not in the early 1990s when he first sounded the warning, but in 1997 after the outbreak of the Asian financial crisis.

Any analyst worth his or her salt knows that in a cyclical market if you stick to one prediction, either of boom or bust, long enough, you will be vindicated in the end. In the investment market on the mainland, the predominant voices are those of the many Dr. Booms.

Never mind that the Shanghai bourse was one of the worst performers in the world over the past 18 months, we kept hearing predictions, purportedly supported by authoritative analysis of government policies and current economic data, of a turnaround month after month. But to the disappointment of the hundreds of thousands of individual investors, the "turnaround fairy" has stubbornly remained elusive.