Options whales looking for Chinese stimulus up tens of millions in less than 10 days
Words from Beijing speak louder than action, spurring a major rally in domestic stocks.
With Trump 2.0 looming, traders put on massive bets that Chinese policymakers would be doing something to buttress the economy.
Those wagers are paying off big time now that “something” — a pledge from the Chinese Communist Party to “implement more proactive fiscal policies and moderately loose monetary policies” in 2025 — has happened.
The Direxion Daily FTSE China Bull 3X Shares ETF, which aims to deliver about 3x the daily return of the FTSE China 50, is up over 20% in early trading.
Traders had been piling into call options that would be money-good if this ETF broke above $27 by January 16, 2026. The appetite for these contracts exploded higher on the last trading day of November and the first one of December, right as these contracts started to be in the money. About 40% of the total call demand for this ETF is tied to this specific strike and expiry.
Based on the volume-weighted price on November 29 and December 2, more than $125 million was spent accumulating a position that is now worth over $200 million.
There was similar whale-type behavior in the Direxion Daily CSI 300 China A Share Bull 2X Shares ETF, which seeks to deliver double the daily return of the CSI 300 Index, in December’s opening trading day.
Open interest in contracts that would be money-good if this ETF for more conservative but still leveraged China bulls eclipsed $15 by May 15, 2025, jumped on December 2 and is up about 50% since then.
Very hard to tell. Mainly done electronically in smaller clips. That’s not really the tell of stock replacement stuff (which usually gets shopped in the pit).
— Kris Sidial🇺🇸 (@Ksidiii) December 3, 2024
Feels like a speculative bet.
This communique from the Politburo may not seem like a sufficient catalyst for such a market rally, until you realize the governing body had been calling for a “prudent” monetary policy for 14 years. The last time China was looking for monetary policy to be moderately loose was in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis.
“This is the strongest signal yet that more aggressive techniques/measures will be used to boost the struggling economy, as it has domestic battles (think of the property sector, for one) and international ones (think big trading partners putting tariffs on many exports coming out of China),” wrote BMO Capital Markets senior economist Jennifer Lee.
On the other hand, this isn’t the first time this year — heck, not even the first time in the past three months — that traders have gone gaga over Chinese stocks.
We’ll see yet again if the hopes embedded in equity markets are discounting a future in which Chinese policymakers actually do more to shore up the economy and financial markets.
