MCHI iShares MSCI China ETF

$MCHI MSCI China's consumer gauges are near a 10-year low. They have fallen about 18% in six months, per Bloomberg. The contrast is the AI-heavy tech index, which has more than doubled since 2016. One-way capital: consumer staples missed earnings expectations by nearly 50% last season, discretionary by about 10%. The valuation gap makes it concrete. Consumer discretionary trades near 11x forward earnings, staples near 13x, against 21x for the info-tech index. August retail sales rose just 0.4%. A Shanghai fund manager quoted in the piece called it crowding out: investors are increasingly concentrated in AI beneficiaries while consumption gets sold indiscriminately. Golden Week starts Thursday. It is historically the travel-and-spending bellwether, so this is the first real datapoint on whether the consumer finds any floor.