In China, real estate investing has been a bit out of style lately (see chart). What is the latest hot investment? Stocks of course, as the Shanghai Composite makes new multi-year highs. In fact the index is up some 58% over the past 6 months – after being stagnant for years (see post from 2012).

Some of this is of course driven by the Shanghai's linkup with Hong Kong (see story). But there is also a significant increase in domestic demand. China's brokers have been quite busy, as (according to Reuters) “new A-share account openings topped 500K every week in December”