Anxiety over the economic fallout of a trade war between the US and China has been a chief worry for equity investors this year. But the Chinese stock market has taken Donald Trump’s imposition of a new round of tariffs on $200bn of Chinese imports in its stride, with the CSI 300, an index of large companies listed on the Chinese mainland, rising 2 per cent on Tuesday.
Even if the news is bad, investors typically favour anything that diminishes uncertainty. And the announcement from the White House does that, at least in the short term. The Trump administration said that tariffs would start at 10 per cent from next week, but could be lifted to 25 per cent in January, giving investors a timeline and allowing investors to try to model the impact of the move.
“Now that we know the tariffs are 10 per cent, and a deadline has been set for 25 per cent, there is an opportunity to buy stocks, and that certainty is what the market has been lacking,” said Nicholas Chui, an investment director at Aberdeen Standard Investments. “And we’ve seen some exhaustion in terms of the selling [of the Chinese stock market]”.
