Chinese mainland investors are helping to drive a bull run in Hong Kong shares, plowing almost HK$150 billion ($19.3 billion) into the financial hub this year, more than seven times the amount they added during the same period in 2024. That’s despite an earlier Chinese New Year holiday reducing the number of trading days this year.

Turnover in the special administrative region via the exchange links accounted for nearly half the total on Monday with another HK$16.5 billion of purchases, the most since early December. Mainland investors have been ardent buyers of Tencent Holdings Ltd, taking their stake to around 11.4 percent of shares outstanding, and of Xiaomi Corp, of which they now own 16.2 percent.

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Optimism over DeepSeek, the mainland-based artificial intelligence startup, has catapulted the Hang Seng Tech Index into a bull market last week. In contrast, onshore investors have been more hesitant to bid up stocks on their side of the border, with the CSI 300 Index down nearly 1 percent for the year.

Also starting Monday, global investors are able to utilize their purchased onshore bonds through Northbound Bond Connect as collateral to conduct repo transactions in the offshore market for the first time.

A repo is a short-term borrowing transaction to sell securities and repurchase them later at a slightly higher price.

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Since the launch of the Bond Connect in July 2017, foreign investors’ holdings of onshore mainland bonds have surged 4.7 times to 4.16 trillion yuan ($569 billion) as of 2024, according to HSBC data.

With staffer inputs