A marginalised market

摘要

"Why do you want to visit the trad- ing floor?" smiles Fang Xinghai, deputy chief executive of the Shanghai Stock Exchange. "There is nothing to see." He is right. But this has little to do with the switch from open-outcry to electronic share-trading to which he refers, because the exchange simply replaced traders' paper slips with computers and kept everyone on the floor. The desks are mostly unmanned, however, or given over to card games. An elegant gong to greet new listings, the equivalent of New York's famous bell, gathered dust for months until a ban on initial public offerings (IPOS) was lifted in January. The only movement is on electronic wall charts tracking prices and vol-umes-and that is resolutely downwards.