Net interest margins in Hong Kong remain under pressure and Standard Chartered Bank's performance here in 2005 would likely not be as strong as in China and elsewhere in the Asia-Pacific where it has expanded aggressively.
Regional markets are higher in the afternoon which helped the Hong Kong market up.
The real pressure in Hong Kong should be on semiconductor stocks like ASM Pacific and QPL, ... As we don't have semiconductor blue chips, pressure on the index shouldn't be too great.
Hong Kong has been outperforming other markets, but buying has mainly been of banking and property stocks and they could not hold at this level because global equities are going down.
The market is down on Wall Street's performance but it may rebound from here because Hutchison and Cheung Kong don't seem to have too much downside and China Mobile's share price in the U.S. didn't fall too sharply overnight.