In just four hours this week, Chinese speculators traded as many apples as the country consumes in 3 months. That’s about 60 billion of the Fujivariety, enough to keep the doctor away for a very, very long time.
In an extraordinary bout of trading on Tuesday, investors on the Zhengzhou Commodity Exchange bought and sold about 964,000 futures contracts. At 10 metric tons apiece and a price of about 7,200 yuan ($1,138) a ton, that’s almost $11 billion worth of apples.
Even in the febrile world of China’s commodity markets, where everything from steel to eggs change hands with an intensity that makes the world’s more established exchanges look docile, the explosion in apple volumes stands out. Each contract was held on average an estimated 16 minutes, compared with about 50 hours for the average crude oil contract on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
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