Chinese authorities have in recent days told some institutional investors not to sell stocks, as regulators face renewed pressure to stabilise share prices following the steep decline in the first weeks of the new year, reports the Financial Times. Since October, market regulators have been providing private instructions—known as “window guidance”—to some investors, which prevent them from being net sellers of equities on certain days.
Such restrictions on selling helped to spur a rebound of about 3% for the benchmark CSI 300 stock index in the final week of 2023, traders said. But as the curbs on some smaller mutual funds and on brokers were eased in the new year, the index completely reversed those gains and is down more than 4% this month.
Beijing has now reimposed such restrictions on securities companies—large institutional investors in China that both act as brokers and have proprietary trading arms—according to traders and investment managers at three different financial institutions.