East Buy Holdings (HKG: 1797) (OTCPK: KLTHF) shares are up 29% today in Hong Kong. Something that's really rather surprising if this particular news report is to be true: “ Shares of East Buy Holding dropped after the e-commerce subsidiary of New Oriental Education & Technology Group started a three-day hiatus of its live-streaming shows to comply with regulations. East Buy [HK:1797], previously known as Koolearn Technology Holding, slid 6.5 percent to close at HKD30.20 (USD3.90), or more than 40 percent down since early January.”
That's not quite consonant with this:
East Buy Holdings share price from Google Finance
Perhaps that ban was rescinded? But the larger point we want to make here is that this is just one of those problems we've got in trying to deal with China Mainland stocks. Yes, we know that East Buy is listed in Hong Kong. But the business is largely on the Mainland. And information doesn't leak out from the Mainland at quite the speed we'd like to be able to trade in - speculate if we prefer - stocks whose major business is there.
In the usual information sources online there simply is no news - in English, which is a part of our point - that even describes this price move at our pixel time. Let alone explains why this might have happened. This illustrates - to us at least - how those of us trading in English outside China just don't have access to the information sources necessary to be able to trade stocks in that market.
We have talked before about East Buy: “The background here is that the authorities, a couple of years back, changed the rules in China's online education market. This rather impacted (we can use grosser phrases if we like) upon the plans of many of the players in that market. There were a number of online education providers quoted on NASDAQ for example, all of whom suffered significant share price declines.” And also noted that East Buy seems to be navigating those changes: “It's this which we think is driving East Buy Holdings shares up. Yes, there were those major changes to the education market a couple of years back. OK, so regroup, do what is allowed to be done and then regain that former growth: “Outstandingly, East Buy Holding's EPS shot from CN¥0.31 to CN¥0.61, over the last year. Year on year growth of 96% is certainly a sight to behold.” We might use slightly different language (being native speakers of English) but yes, that is impressive.”
That Mainland education market is large, fast changing and potentially extremely profitable. Our problem from out here is that the information sources about it don't seem to exist in our language and time zone. Which does make trading such stocks rather difficult. Here we've a one third increase in the price of a China education stock and no information as to why? A difficult market to trade, that.