Imagine you’re in the middle of an exciting conversation, fingers racing across the keyboard, but boom—you accidentally made a typo. Or maybe in an email? You will most likely be embarrassed or disappointed in yourself, or worse, you will get fired. We’ve all been there, haven’t we?
Well, so did JP Morgan. But theirs was a billion dollar mess!
JP Morgan Chase & Co. released a report declaring Chinese internet stocks “uninvestable”.
The bank’s editorial board was asked to have the word “non-investable” removed from 28 research reports before they were published on March 14 last year.
While the word was successfully removed from most of the reports, and in some cases, the word “uninvestable” was replaced by “unattractive”, it still appeared in the published version of four, including one on JD.com.
The line reads:
“As risk management becomes the most important consideration among global investors in relation to their China investment strategy, as they price in China’s geopolitical risks, we view China Internet as ‘uninvestable’ from a six-12 month point of view with a binary stock price perspective. ”
Ironically, the note also predicted that at least 10 of China’s internet companies will see their stock prices rise by the end of the year.
All this has happened at a time when the technology sector has faced crackdowns and Zero-Covid policies have caused disruptions in the world’s second largest economy.
As a result, American and Asian markets lost about $200 billion, according to Bloomberg.
Despite acknowledging the editorial error, JPMorgan stood by the versions of the reports released to the public. A JPMorgan spokesperson told Bloomberg that they stand by their published research and the analyst’s independent analysis of the sector, and some subjective terms used interchangeably don’t change that.
As a result, JPMorgan was removed as the senior underwriter for the planned Hong Kong shares of Kingsoft Cloud Holdings.