Its not virtue signalling - its good sound business. The US rules prevent citizens from trading China etc stocks. Indexes like HSI include stocks considered tarnished so you guys arent allowed to trade their futures. IB, bless them, recognize that international customers can still trade them, so we can. Yay! My other broker took a US centric view and simply raised margin to the point where you couldnt trade. So Im 100% IB again.
Yes indeed sanction related for US people: https://home.treasury.gov/policy-is...ormation/chinese-military-companies-sanctions
IMO that's idiotic (economically; so it's probably a political blow). The sanctioned companies are like, what, under 10% of the indexes by number, market cap, whatever? So let's ban trading indexes of the world's second largest economy because of a few companies in that country.
I am with IB. For probably longer than you have been. Does not change the fact that it's just another example of overshooting and virtue signaling. Not by IB but by US administrators and the house. It's a US firm and happily does business with and in China and all non Americans can continue to go about doing business. All the while every last American consumes Chinese products day in day out, the same products that are made by state owned company and almost every CEO of Chinese companies being a CCP member. What hypocrisy. I am extremely critical of Chinese culture but one thing China is right about. America needs to stop meddling in others' affairs. Keep the dirty fingers out of how Germany and Europe does oil and natural gas business with Russia. America causes the exact opposite effect. Germany and Europe warms up to Russia more and more while America relegates itself to the villain who interferes everywhere it has no business interfering. If morals or ethics counted at all then American firms should not do business with Chinese state owned companies. Yet they do business every single day. Contradiction after contradiction. The only criticism I have towards US brokers is that a bunch of American broker CEO and CFO wankers, including IB, get on a conference call and completely overshoot any regulations that have been imposed. Self preservation? Conservatism? I am not sure. What I am absolutely sure about is that there is no way that any US regulator or administration prohibited brokers from facilitating orders in Hangseng Index Futures.
And let's all shed SPX500 as benchmark at all buy-side firms and block all futures and options trading because there are 2 companies in the index that offer backdoors to the NSA and FBI. Typical American bullshit. The big problem I see is that the American bullshit/excellence ratio is strongly trending upwards over the past decades and there is no sign of a reversion...
link to the law or signed bill pls. I would like to see where the regulator or administration specifically prohibits trading in Hang Seng or any index that contains any of the 3 companies on the sanctioned list. Not saying it can't be but I have not found anything even after some search. Please no clippings from a newspaper, I can find that myself. I am interested in the SOURCE. Alibaba happily trading on Nasdaq but can't trade Hang Seng Index? Height of hyprocisy.
These Chinese companies do not just provide backdoors to the Chinese military. They are OWNED by the Chinese military aka the Chinese government. When you invest in these companies, you are directly giving money to the Chinese government for them to do everything including but not limited to, sanctioning western governments, raising tariffs on foreign imports, occupying islands in the South China Sea, violating the Basic Law principles with regards to Hong Kong, expanding geopolitical influences in establishing the one-belt-one-road initiatives with the explicit exclusion of western countries ... This is only the few ways left that the west can still do to keep some autonomy from being completely taken over by China. Relax, US and the rest of the western world is still trading with China. It's not like the US and the west are completely excluding China, not that China cares in any way now that it's its own world economy and can really sustain its own domestic economy without trading with anybody.