English Quiz 155

(English Quiz 155)

1. It's Friday night, and the back-alley Hanoi Internet cafe's buzzing with video-game warriors noisily slaying dragons. But Trung, a 26-year-old engineer, is there to make a killing of a different kind. Logging onto an Internet chat room dedicated to stock trading, he joins about 1,000 other Vietnamese with aliases like "warrenbuffet74" and "wallstreethanoi" who are in search of the day's hot deals. "I'm selling 13,000 shares of CavicoE," reads one message. "Price is 31,000 dong per share. Contact Manh." The next message reads: "Oh, what a pity. I just bought the same stock at 32,000—I wish I'd found you before." Trung (who asked not to be identified by his full name) chuckles and shakes his head. "These two are probably the same person using different nicknames to drive up the price," he explains. It's a tactic Trung knows well—he says he has used it himself. In his day job at a water utility, Trung earns just $300 per month, but since mortgaging his parents' house to raise capital last year, he claims to have raked in about $20,000 in profits from online share trading. "If you're clever," he says, "you can increase your money by five times in a few months.

2. What's surprising about Trung is not his profit projections—just about everyone is giddy about Vietnamese investments these days—but where he's making his money. While the nation's fledgling official bourses in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City are surging, Trung and many other local punters prefer to invest where the action is even headier: he typically trades in an unsanctioned market composed of websites and Internet chat rooms frequented by thousands of investors who swap unlisted shares of partially privatized Vietnamese companies. Participants call this the over-the-counter (OTC) market, a reference to exchanges abroad that provide an arena for trading small stocks. But unlike OTC bourses elsewhere, Vietnam's market has no licensed brokers, virtually no regulatory oversight, and trades often culminate with the exchange of cash for paper shares at a local tea shop. Think of it as an amorphous eBay for speculators, an ad hoc gray market that sprouted spontaneously from the pent-up desire among the Vietnamese to cash in on the country's economic boom. "It's the Wild West," says Noritaka Akamatsu, the World Bank's lead financial economist in Hanoi.
Q: 試翻 "What's surprising about ... making his money."
Q: 試翻 "Think of it ... economic boom."

3. A few years ago, sites like Sanotc.com couldn't have existed because there was no stock to trade. The vast majority of Vietnam's companies belonged wholly to the state. But as part of the government's move to a free-market economy, some 3,600 state-owned companies have been partially privatized by issuing shares to employees, managers and the public—who in turn have sold them through the Internet and in private deals with family, friends and acquaintances. This is capitalism in the raw. When deals are struck, whether online or over tea, purchasers take physical possession of the shares, and buyer and seller often go to the company's headquarters to register the change of ownership. In some cases, no registration takes place; the seller only provides a bill of sale.
Q: 試翻 "This is capitalism in the raw. ... the change of ownership."