Wang Ping distracts herself from the stock market by baking. "I have to wait for an upturn," she says. "I could never sell at a loss."
Xu Bo (Alias), 65, describes his trades over the past seven years as "a blind man riding a blind horse". Looking at his losses, he shakes his head: "It is hard to comprehend how much it fell in such a short time."
He thought he was being savvy in his investments: "When I heard about the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank on the television news, I expected my machinery-related stocks to rise."
However, even if he loses no more, he will need at least two years to recoup his losses with his pension.
CSRC vice-president Yao Gang once remarked that most individual investors neglected to study reports or documents with essential information. Their trades relied on "messages" , which is why China' s turnover is the highest in the world.
It is widely believed that the dominance of individual investors has a disruptive influence on China' s A share market, but Yu can' t say that of her clients: "We have no reason to blame them. Our stock market is far from mature."
Easy trading
Many of Yu' s clients are aged 50 or over -- investors willing to pay the fee so they can get face-to-face advice, but a growing number of younger people buy and sell stocks online.
According to the 36th Analysis Report on China' s Internet Development, the number of China' s online investors was 56.28 million in June, up 47.4 percent from last year. By the end of 2013, more than 60 million investors -- 68 percent of the total -- were aged under 40.
Yu Fan (Alias), 40, does her job on her mobile phone, using the 3G network that launched commercially in 2009.
Using simple trading apps, young shareholders receive data, and sell and buy stocks on smart phones. In June, 32-year-old He Dian created a website called "Bullet Stock," where comments from investors zoom across the screen like bullets. Three days after its launch, it had more than a million viewers. Humorous remarks now float across the screen: "Maybe Deng Ziqi' s Bubble is a good song for today," says one post.
Early this year, He bought into the stock market with 100,000 yuan. "With the money I earned in the first couple of months, I was planning to buy a BMW. Later, it was only enough for a Smart car. Now I owe the market a Chery QQ."
Mixed feelings
In June, the total market value of China' s two stock exchanges exceeded 70 trillion RMB. The figure was less than 3 trillion a decade ago. Arguably ordinary Chinese will continue to expand their asset portfolios as cash savings still account for half of family assets and individual debt is low.
However, individual investors have mixed feelings about the stock market: they love it because it unleashes the vitality of the market economy and allows ordinary people to share the dividends of economic growth; they hate it because its volatility has destroyed their dreams of wealth, driven by what they perceive as policy influences, an opaque system and regulatory neglect.
According to a report from China International Capital Corporation Ltd., the middle class has suffered the most. Since May, the number of investors with an investment of under 500,000 RMB fell by 240,000 a month on average, while the number with 500,000 to 1 million RMB was down by 85,500, and those with 1 million to 5 million RMB dropped by 127,500.
Dai Sujie, a 30-something white collar worker who has traded stocks since 2003, sensed a bull market coming earlier this year and put some of the down-payment saved for a house into shares. His earnings reached 40 percent by May, when he smelled the oncoming panic and halved his investment. In July, earnings on the remaining half came to zero.
"I did not suffer losses from this crash, maybe because I am not greedy," he says. He concluded that the real masters are not those looking at the bull market, but those who can foresee a bear market. "It requires excellent vision and focus," he says, "Not many people have these qualities."
