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Shanghai - Chinese brokers have seen a surge of new stock investors and a dramatic spike in turnover on soaring local bourses, some risking borrowed money in response to government policy measures aimed at supporting a faltering economy.
The flood of small investors suggests Beijing is finally persuading people to allocate capital more broadly to the economy, instead of betting it all on property, though the last policy-led stock rally ended in a brutal crash.
Encouraging individuals to plough some of their $8.2trn of bank deposits into stock markets is critical if China's companies are to have reliable access to equity financing and wean themselves off excessive debt.
Official data showed Chinese retail investors, who conduct 60-80% of stock trades in China, opened over a million new brokerage accounts in November, up 280% year-on-year, after years of stagnation.
Hit new highs
"Before this year we had to actively go find clients and tell them to trade stocks, but they wouldn't," said Xiong Yepeng, sales associate in Beijing at China Securities.
"We'd open on average three or five customer accounts per day. But now we average 20 or 30."
Transaction levels have hit new highs. Trading volume on the Shanghai Composite Index closed at 56.1 billion shares on Wednesday, up 20.66% from the previous record on Friday, 7-day average volumes are up 165% since October 28, 459% for the year.
The CSI300 index of the largest companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen rose 4.6% on Thursday, their biggest one-day gain since July 2013. The index has surged 20% since the central bank unexpectedly cut interest rates on November 21 to counter the country's slowest growth in decades.
