These two charts show a big problem. There’s too much cash chasing yields while the fourth largest bond market globally (China) has only 1.5% of its bonds owned by foreigners. So, a record $10 trillion in govt bonds have negative yields & negative yields destroy banks. The opening of China is vital for both China & the world. The China Big Bang begins.

The expanded cloud business for Tencent is Alicloud lite — but Tencent seems to be taking a turn into education, healthcare and robotics.

The Platform and Content group is mobile internet, online media and social network combined. Combining video, data analysis, and marketing. Impressive.

Tencent is smartly gluing apps onto WeChat. Zhihu does trends. Keep does fitness. Huya does live video. Pinduoduo is a smash hit.

Here’s the new face of Tencent. PCG is platform and content group. CSIG is SME Cloud group. Keeping up with the Joneses? Is Tencent is playing catchup with Alibaba?  Better late than never.

When I saw Alibaba’s team in Beijing a few years ago, they were just rolling out Dingtalk. It had only 2.5 million users and they were quietly hoping to use this SME app and convert it to a payroll and working capital lending vehicle. Cut to three years later and it now has 100 mn. users and 43 mn. SME users — and 7 mn. enterprise users. Unparalleled execution globally.

The Bank of Japan may be the first central bank to launch a ‘sovereign crypto coin’. Oxymoronic? You bet. What the heck. This is the trend, Friend. Alipay and Mizuho will work together to launch this in anticipation of the 2020 Olympics.

Alibaba’s A100 is the one to watch. It is a powerful corporate platform and is branching out to major brands like Starbucks, Nestle, P&G and L’Oreal to reduce costs, expand image, improve logistics and process data.

Alibaba’s cloud business is increasingly spreading into the Far East to 3.3 bn people. It is the foundation of new retail, SME, entertainment, payments, logistics, and social media. It has awesome first mover advantage. 

  The chart below shows the extent of the fall in spreads - indicating reduced stress, primarily in the $1.4 trillion CLO market - and also the standard deviation. We have now moved from a 2 standard deviation period of extreme stress to more normalised spreads. They are still elevated.