Some of Wall Street’s biggest banks are betting on a substantial rebound for China’s stock market in 2024 after last year’s brutal rout, even as many fund managers remain wary of diving back in without stronger policy signals from Beijing.Strategists at JPMorgan have forecast that the MSCI China index will finish this year up roughly 18 cent from where it closed out December. Goldman Sachs has set its 12-month target for the index at the same level.
Injections of fiscal and monetary support administered by the Chinese Communist party to rejuvenate the economy have so far failed to arrest a sell-off in locally-listed stocks, with the MSCI benchmark falling more than 13 per cent last year.
“It’s like ‘Waiting for Godot’,” said Alain Bokobza, head of global asset allocation at Société Générale, leaning on Samuel Beckett’s absurdist play of the same name to describe the many false dawns for the Chinese stock market last year. “We’ve had a tactical ‘overweight’ on Chinese equities for a while. It’s been very painful.”