You don't need to be too long in the tooth to recall the stunt pulled one April Fool's Day by a leading Hong Kong-based broker. At the height of the emerging markets frenzy of the early 1990s, Smith New Court sent its clients a research bulletin dated April 1 which urged them to buy into a forthcoming IPO from Bhutan Dry Docks. The response was a handful of preliminary orders from investors apparently oblivious to the fact that Bhutan is a tiny, land-locked country with no stock market.
The joke has come closer to reality with the technology IPOs that have gripped Hong Kong's imagination this year. Just how close is anybody's guess, but internet-related companies with no earnings and negligible track records are cascading onto Hong Kong's stock market, and local investors can't get enough of them.
The most striking example of mass internet hysteria...
