Hong Kong's IPO Crash Indicator

China Literature has echoes of previous sales that signaled market tops.
Photographer: Laurent Fievet/AFP/Getty Images
Lock
This article is for subscribers only.

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

Like military campaigns, market cycles are subject to uncertainty in their duration. Winston Churchill's famous admonition was an attempt to damp euphoria after the Allied victory at El Alamein in 1942, knowing of the long, hard slog that lay ahead. We could just as well apply it to the latest wave of elation sweeping through Hong Kong's stock market.