(Bloomberg) — Like millions of amateur investors across China, Min Hang has become infatuated with the country’s surging stock market.

“There’s no way I can lose,” said the 36-year-old, who works at a technology startup and opened her first trading account in Beijing on Tuesday. “Right now, I’m feeling invincible.”

Five years after China’s last big equity boom ended in tears, signs of euphoria among the nation’s investing masses are popping up everywhere. Turnover has soared, margin debt has risen at the fastest pace since 2015 and online trading platforms have struggled to keep up. Over the past eight days

(Bloomberg) — HSBC Holdings Plc, which draws more than two-thirds of its pretax income from Hong Kong, slumped as advisers to U.S. President Donald Trump discussed a potential move to punish banks in the city and destabilize the currency peg to the dollar.

Europe’s largest financial institution was named as a potential target, Bloomberg News reported, citing people familiar with the matter. U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo last month singled out Peter Wong, the bank’s Asia-Pacific chief executive officer, for signing a petition supporting “Beijing’s disastrous decision to destroy Hong Kong’s autonomy.”

“Disruption to the currency peg and dollar

(Bloomberg) — China’s equity market is firmly in the spotlight after an almost unprecedented rally that helped lift global stocks to a one-month high.

The speed of the past week’s gains in China is in many ways unseen since the stock bubble that burst five years ago. Monday’s surge alone added more than $460 billion to Chinese stock values, behind just one day in July 2015 as the biggest increase in shareholder wealth since the global financial crisis.

The advance continued on Tuesday, though at a slower pace. The CSI 300 Index rose 0.6% at the close to extend its

(Bloomberg) — The dramatic moves in Chinese stocks over the past week are inviting comparisons with a bubble that burst spectacularly five years ago.

In many ways, the pace of gains matches the market’s melt-up that started in the final weeks of 2014. The CSI 300 Index has now added 14% in five days, the most since December that year. A gauge of momentum on the CSI 300 is also the strongest since late 2014. Shares of brokerages surged as daily turnover exceeded 1.5 trillion yuan ($213 billion) for the first time since 2015, indicating increasing participation from retail investors.

(Bloomberg) — Crude oil is the world’s most important commodity, but it’s worthless without a refinery turning it into the products that people actually use: gasoline, diesel, jet-fuel and petrochemicals for plastics. And the world’s refining industry today is in pain like never before.

“Refining margins are absolutely catastrophic,” Patrick Pouyanne, the head of Europe’s top oil refining group Total SA, told investors last month, echoing a widely held view among executives, traders and analysts.

What happens to the oil refining industry at this juncture will have ripple effects across the rest of the energy industry. The multi-billion-dollar plants employ

MANILA (Reuters) – Immigration records showing Wirecard’s former chief operating officer Jan Marsalek arrived in the Philippines on June 23 and departed for China the next day were falsified, Philippines Justice Secretary Menardo Guevarra said on Saturday.

Guevarra said the immigration officers who inputted the fictitious entries have been relieved of their duties and face administrative sanctions.

“The investigation has now turned to persons who made the false entries in the database, their motives and their cohorts,” Guevarra told reporters.

Marsalek, 40, was fired as COO of the German firm on June 18 after auditor EY refused to sign off

(Bloomberg) — Pine Labs, the Indian payments company backed by Sequoia Capital and Mastercard Inc., is considering a bid for fallen fintech star Wirecard AG’s businesses in Southeast Asia and India, according to people familiar with the matter.

A potential bid is still at an exploratory stage, as there’s no information available yet on the valuation and finances of Wirecard’s Asian operations, said the people, who asked not to be identified as the information is confidential. There’s no certainty that Pine Labs will proceed with a formal bid, the people added.

The sale of Wirecard’s businesses will be clouded by

(Bloomberg) — One of Wall Street’s hottest innovations is being hailed as the potential key to luring trillions of actively managed dollars to the booming market for exchange-traded funds. Yet two of the industry’s biggest players want no part of it for now.

Vanguard Group and State Street Corp. say they’re in wait-and-see mode as active, non-transparent funds take their crucial first steps in the $4.3 trillion U.S. arena for ETFs.

These products come with many of the benefits of traditional ETFs but drastically reduced disclosure requirements. That makes so-called ANTs a likely conduit to bring stock-picking strategies to the

FRANKFURT (Reuters) – Wirecard’s administrator said he has received strong inbound interest for the payment firm’s assets and will shortly mandate banks for the sale of individual parts of the company.

“A large number of investors from all over the world have contacted us, interested in acquiring either the core business or business units that are independent of it”, Michael Jaffe said in a statement after a creditor committee meeting late on Tuesday.

Wirecard filed for insolvency last week owing creditors almost $4 billion after disclosing a 1.9 billion euro ($2.1 billion) hole in its accounts that its auditor EY

(Bloomberg) — Royal Dutch Shell Plc will write down between $15 billion and $22 billion in the second quarter, as the company gave investors a wider glimpse of just how severely the coronavirus crisis has hit Big Oil.

The pandemic left no part of the energy giant’s sprawling business unscathed. Oil production slowed, fuel sales fell and shipments of everything from liquefied natural gas to petrochemicals suffered.

The dire second quarter also threatened to have a lasting legacy, as reductions in long-term price forecasts will force writedowns on the value of assets all over the world, with its integrated gas