Gartman: China's bull market just getting started
Last week, a trio of Hong Kong-listed stocks injected a dose of fear into Chinese markets when they unexpectedly shed billions of dollars off their market caps in a matter of hours. Yet according to Dennis Gartman of "The Gartman Letter," China's bull market is still intact.
While other singular stocks could see similar volatility, the widely-followed analyst tells CNBC the average investor shouldn't be afraid of investing in the world's second-largest economy.
China stocks finished off the week at seven-year highs, extending a huge run for the Shanghai Composite Index (Shanghai Stock Exchange: .SSEC), which has nearly doubled in just the past 6 months. Under the surface of China's rally, however, a number of companies were hit hard by a tumultuous week of trading.
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Shares of solar company Hanergy Thin Film Power (Hong Kong Stock Exchange: 566-HK) dropped nearly 50 percent on Wednesday, causing the company's chairman to lose $15 billion in mere minutes. Then on Thursday, Goldin Financial Holdings (Hong Kong Stock Exchange: 530-HK) and Goldin Properties (Hong Kong Stock Exchange: 283-HK) plummeted as much as 60 percent each. Those companies said they were not aware of any reason for the massive moves lower, according to a Reuters report.
Gartman said the sudden price collapses could be a troubling signal for some other high-flying Chinese names. "There's never just one cockroach," he said on CNBC's " Fast Money " last week. "This is going to become a series of events I'm afraid."
Gartman compared the wild swings this week to similar circumstances that investors in the volatile U.S. biotech sector have seen again and again. For example, earlier this month shares of Puma Biotechnology (NYSE: PBYI) lost nearly a quarter of their value when the company's cancer trial results missed expectations.
The analyst said that just as investors shouldn't shy away from buying broader biotechnology exchange traded funds just because some components see wild moves, so too should they not be discouraged from investing in China because of this week's volatile swings.
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According to Gartman, if the trend of high-flying Hong Kong names crashing back to earth continues, it will "give us a chance, finally, to be a buyer of Chinese stocks."
Dramatic price swings "will send enough people to the sidelines, put enough fear in people to stay on the side and send prices lower," he said. "Then you can be a buyer, and you should be."
Gartman said that if China's market corrects between 10 and 20 percent in the next couple months, he would look to get exposure to what he calls the shift to a "consumer-driven, consumer-oriented" society via two exchange-traded fund (ETF) plays.
"I think the easiest thing is to go to FXI (NYSE Arca: FXI) and PEK (NYSE Arca: PEK). Those are the 2 dominant ETFs. I think that's the only way for the public to be involved in a market that divergent, that far away, that geographically removed."
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