Coronavirus fears tame HK stock market performance on first trading day after Chinese New Year

Asia • January 29, 2020, 10:06AM EST
Michael Gordon / Shutterstock

After a Chinese New Year holiday marked by fears of the coronavirus outbreak, Hong Kong's stock market dipped as it reopened Wednesday. 

The Hang Seng Index fell 2.82%, with almost all stocks trading lower on the first day. Landlords, travel, and casino stocks were among those that took a beating, as many Chinese stayed home to avoid the spreading disease, per a Bloomberg report.

The Hong Kong market closed last Friday for the Chinese New Year, after which the global situation of coronavirus worsened as the number of confirmed cases of inflection grew rapidly. As of Wednesday morning Beijing time, 5,974 cases have been confirmed as the death toll climbed to 132, according to a report from the Washington Post.

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Meanwhile, bitcoin's price picked up, surging from roughly $8,300 last Friday to around $9,300 today.

However, as Hong Kong-based QCP Capital managing partner Darius Sit contended, the price of bitcoin is largely not correlated with the virus outbreak. 

"BTC risk is idiosyncratically driven by leveraged positions... [The virus is] not the primary driver at least," Sit told The Block. 

Source: Coinbase

About Author

Celia joined The Block as a reporter after earning her BA in the History of Science from the University of Chicago. Having spent years pondering over why 2+2 cannot equal 5, she is interested in the history and philosophy of mathematics, computation, and cryptography. She also had a very brief stint at Crunchbase News.