Genscript Biotech (HKG: 1548) (OTCPK: GNNSF) shares are up 12% (OK, 11.8% if you must) in Hong Kong today. The share price rise is because - well, because no one really knows. Or perhaps the more accurate statement is that no one in the English speaking world currently knows why Genscript is up today. We can even qualify that a little more, no one outside the specific stock markets and also English speaking knows why.
This gives us a useful little lesson about stocks in non-English speaking countries. For us as retail investors of course we've got any number of information sources. But we do still face information barriers in languages and so on. So it's entirely possible for things to go one out there that we just can't get up to speed upon. Sure, it's great that a $4 billion market cap company has just risen 12%. That's near $500 million in added value in a day - who wouldn't want some of that? But even though that's just happened there's no simple and easily available explanation of why it has. Now, given that it has already happened at Genscript and there's no explanation as yet think how hard it's going to be to predict such price moves given the information sources we have?
Genscript Biotech share price from Hong Kong Stock Exchange
OK, so we can find out what is done at Genscript: “Genscript Biotech Corporation, an investment holding company, engages in the manufacture and sale of life science research products and services in North America, Europe, the People's Republic of China, Japan, the other Asia Pacific regions, and internationally. The company operates through four segments: Life Science Services and Products, Biologics Development Services, Industrial Synthetic Biology Products, and Cell Therapy.” And so on. It's recently (two weeks back) doubled manufacturing capacity in China. There are international cooperations as with Bio Immunitas. But that's all historic information.
For this 12% price movement today we've (before this is published of course) the one snippet, which just notes that there's been a 12% change in Genscript shares. And that's it. Which is the point that we want to try and get across here. There's undoubtedly more information available in Chinese (of different forms of course) and possibly on stock market terminals and so on. But for us out here are retail investors we can't even find out why the share price moved, let alone why it might move in the future.
There are markets, stocks on varied markets, that we just can't grasp the information on. Therefore we should probably not be trying to trade such stocks. Trading without information is not known to be greatly wealth enhancing.
