A new wave of people who gambled their down payments on the stock market are starting to regret it.
Many secrets of Chinese people's lives are hidden in dinner parties.
Apart from the Spring Festival, the Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day are the occasions most likely to gather relatives and friends scattered across different places. In the past, the main topics at the dinner table were pressuring people to get married, have children, buy a house and decorate their homes.
This year, although these topics still come up, the conversation will always stray halfway and turn to a new direction:
The stock market.
When talking about stocks, the drowsy will be refreshed, and the silent will speak their minds enthusiastically. Every family has its own troubles, and every investor has stocks trapped in losses.
Stocks have become the top topic to go with drinks at family reunion dinners this year.
Some people transferred their temporarily unused house purchase funds into stock accounts, some are dissatisfied with the too-low deposit interest rate, and others finally cannot hold back when seeing their friends making money. According to the disclosure of the Shanghai Stock Exchange, in the first eight months of this year, a total of about 25.21 million new A-share accounts were opened on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, a year-on-year increase of about 46%.
When people put money into the market, they expect value appreciation, doubling their principal and early retirement;
After several rounds of ups and downs, their goals gradually converge: to get the principal back first.
During this holiday, we talked with several young people who have just entered the stock market, about how they put their money into the market, and how they re-plan their lives after experiencing gains and losses.
The "three sets of tools to recover principal" for middle-class stock investors
Cut back on coffee expenses, cancel travel plans, and work overtime during the National Day holiday
Apart from veteran investors who have experienced many market fluctuations, most new investors have gradually "entered the market" in the past two years. To be precise, it was after the market rally on September 24 the year before last.
Looking back at that time, the Shanghai Composite Index rose by 30% in just one National Day holiday, and even the rare scenario of the whole market hitting the 10% daily limit once appeared.
Case is a witness of this market rally.
He opened his A-share account very early, but there were only 20,000 to 30,000 yuan in it in total. Even such a small sum of money brought him a profit of more than 5,000 yuan after the National Day holiday. This money-making speed made him feel dizzy —
What if the money in the account was 200,000 yuan or 300,000 yuan?
Most of Case's savings are in another account, which is the house purchase fund he reserved for himself.
In most games, the place that traps the most players is the novice village. Xiao Zhang has been stuck in the novice village task of saving enough down payment for five or six years.
However, as he is getting closer to his goal, Xiao Zhang's motivation to buy a house is getting lower and lower. The 5-year social security requirement for house purchase qualification has been reduced to 3 years, then to 2 years, and then to 1 year. Even the new post-2000 colleagues who just joined the company easily obtained the house purchase qualification.
But all of a sudden, no one wants to buy a house anymore.
The housing price has dropped synchronously with the relaxation of house purchase qualifications. In the past three years, the price of a one-bedroom apartment in the community where Xiao Zhang rents has dropped by an amount equivalent to the price of a full bathroom, and the rent has been cut again and again.
The money originally intended for buying a house now has no clear destination.
The September 24 market rally came just in time. Xiao Zhang started to learn about funds and study stocks. At first, his reason was very simple: this sum of money will not be used in recent years, and it cannot be left idle all the time.
He never thought of getting rich by stock trading, he just hoped to get more returns than bank deposits.
San San's motivation to enter the stock market is to "dance with the times". Since last year, he has gradually transferred his deposits to the stock account and heavily invested in the technology sector.
In previous years, most of these deposits were placed in stable products: time deposits, bank wealth management products (named with suffixes like "ying" or "bao"), and at most some bond funds. They would not surge sharply, but at least they would not let you down.
But the interest rate has been declining year by year, and the eggs scattered in different baskets finally only get a return of around 1%, which can hardly be said to be barely useful, it is basically a waste of effort.
Warren Buffett once said: No one wants to get rich slowly. This is especially true for young people. Those who ride the tide will stand at the top of the waves, but those who pick the wrong wave will be knocked down into the water.
Social media and news platforms push new wealth creation stories every day:
Liang Wenfeng, born in 1985, is already a veteran in this industry, and Yang Zhilin, the founder of Kimi, was born in 1992.
Wang Xingxing (from Unitree Robotics), Peng Zhihui (from Fourier Intelligence), Liang Jingkang (from Insta360)... People of the same age as Xiao Wang have lined up to ring the listing bell of their companies.
As for the post-1995 generation like Luo Fuli and Yao Shunyu, they have already achieved huge success very early.
Even the children of relatives taking college entrance exams will come to ask if studying something called AI is very profitable now. In this market atmosphere, FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) is a widespread emotion.
Most people did not enter the market at the low point, they finally could not resist buying when the market was extremely hot.
People who enter the market have different goals.
Case's view is that it is fine as long as the principal is guaranteed; San San's goal, according to himself, is to "beat inflation".
What people say verbally, what they think in mind, and what they finally get are often completely different results.
Those who say they will go all-in actually cannot stand even the slightest market fluctuation; those who say they only want to beat inflation always cannot resist heavy position investment and frequent trading.
The most "sensitive" question at the middle-class homecoming dinner party
Have you got your principal back yet?
When stocks go up, the atmosphere at friends' gatherings gets better, and even the office is filled with pleasant air.
Who looks better recently, who has bought a new mobile phone, and who rushes to pay the bill when treating guests may all be related to the recent market trend.
In a bull market, everyone feels that they are a once-in-a-generation stock trading genius. Buffett is slightly less talented, Dalio is slightly less charming, and the real stock god is the one standing in front of you right now.
Some people's profit or loss is written on their faces, while some people hide their returns in their social media posts.
Wang Dong belongs to the latter type.
Since last summer, his friends have noticed that the frequency of his travels has increased greatly, and the secret is four words: non-ferrous metals.
Wang Dong never treats himself badly. Every stock rally will be converted into a travel: a small rally means a trip within the province, and a big rally means a trip abroad.
The daily 10% price limit rise and vacation are the most effective ways to get rid of the tiredness from work. The money he earned from semiconductor stocks finally flowed back into the tourism sector.
Xiao Luo invested his money in the consumer sector.
When the market was doing well in the first half of this year, his floating book profit in one day was equivalent to his monthly salary.
In the past, when he was slacking off at work, he would calculate how much money he could "earn" from the company in half an hour; after he started stock trading, he found that working hard for a whole month could not compare with one daily 10% price limit rise.
At the stock high point in May, Xiao C cleared a large number of items in his shopping cart, and replaced his old iPhone and MacBook that had been used for years with new ones that he had wanted for a long time.
This impulsive consumption turned out to be the most correct choice he made a few months later. With the sharp rise in memory chip prices, the value of these products has soared by a large margin now.
〓 The same model has already risen by 1000 yuan
But his stocks were not so lucky — since June, his positions have plummeted, and many individual stocks have lost 50% of their value.
From being all smiles to looking haggard, it only takes a few trading days.
Stock performance is reflected on people's faces, and some people choose to "short sell" their colleagues' mood.
Sister Zhang's colleague is a heavy holder of Hang Seng Tech Index stocks and a loyal fan of Xiaomi. As the saying goes, if you love someone, you want to spend money for them, but the thing you love sometimes makes you look very green (meaning you are suffering heavy losses).
The position that main investors dare not take was taken by Sister Zhang — she chose to buy when her colleague was sighing in frustration.
After a period of persistence, the one who sighs all day long became Sister Zhang herself.
The poor performance of stocks spreads from one person to another, and the work group has now become a group for Hang Seng Tech loss victims, which regularly shares Hang Seng Tech jokes and short AI videos.
Even the group coffee orders have been downgraded.
When people were making money, they ordered Grid Coffee and Peet's Coffee together; later they switched to Manner and Luckin Coffee; then they started to buy large bottles of UCC instant coffee to keep in the fridge.
Finally, people in the group began to remind each other that the boiled tap water in the company is actually not bad.
These self-deprecating jokes can make people feel a little relaxed. The losses of thousands or tens of thousands of yuan in the accounts are already gone, and saving money on coffee at least brings visible comfort.
People's preference for stocks often reflects their occupation and personality. Different positions also divide relatives and friends into different camps.
Xiao Luo is one of the first groups of people whose workflow has been changed by the AI revolution, so his positions are all stocks in the upstream and downstream sectors highly related to AI.
San San's attitude is much more conservative, and his positions are mainly dividend stocks and various thematic ETFs.
When technology stocks rise, people who go all in on AI will feel that the world rewards pioneers; when there are occasional market adjustments, people who stick to traditional blue-chip stocks will get some comfort: he who laughs last laughs longest.
People joke on the surface, but privately they are all waiting for the market trend to prove themselves right.
Just like parenting bloggers always disappear when their children reach Grade 3, the stock gurus who love to show off their returns have all gone silent since June. After the "best summer", the sharp pullback has spread to almost all sectors. All roads lead to Rome, and various investment strategies finally bring almost the same loss.
Xiao Luo's AI positions suffered heavy losses. At first