Quote from Willleung:
Yeah, some of them use real estate money, but those are the fortunate type. Those retirees hanging around brokerage, as you saw on TV, those are the people who lived throught late 70s and early 80s (not an open eco back then), usually in government/SOE positions, with very little edcuation (grow up in the 60s, during the cultural revoluation, that's a political unrest lasted for almost 10 years), those people simply can't recover...
I know a IBM sale manager who have the bulk of her wealth in real estate and stocks, she is the well educated type (late 30s, Beijiang Univesity Guadate), and they still get stuck in stocks and prepare to sit through some down turns (that was when the SSEC index at 3600), she just lost another 15%...
Mind you, you can't short stocks in China, and there are no index futures (not 100% sure now, but they delay introducation ever since early 2007), not sure about index options, but you do get some stock options in Shanghai. Just imagine a INVESTOR or a trader trying to work through a bear market with the products avariable to them, ROTFLMAO...