HK$121 Billion a Day From the Mainland. The Last Foreign-Investor Count Was 2020.

2025 was a record year for Hong Kong. Cash market turnover averaged HK$230.7 billion a day over the first eleven months, up 43% on the year before. The exchange finished first among global IPO venues, with HK$274.6 billion raised from 106 new listings as at 19 December. On an average day the market now moves more than two and a half times what it moved in 2019.

None of those figures says where the money came from. One document would settle it. Hong Kong Exchanges has surveyed the brokers who execute the trades, every year since 1991, and asked them where their clients are.

The last edition covers 2020.

The instrument, and the definition inside it

The Cash Market Transaction Survey is not a fund-flow estimate or a strategist's model. It goes to the exchange participants who handle the orders and asks them to attribute their turnover by investor type and by country of origin. Twenty-five editions run from 1994/95 to 2020, on top of the earlier ones. HKEX published the 2020 edition in April 2022. Nothing has followed it.

The survey also carries a definition that most people reading the phrase "overseas investors" would not expect. From the 2016 edition onward, Southbound trading through Stock Connect is attributed to overseas investors from Mainland China. Mainland money sits inside the foreign number, and has done since Stock Connect became material.

That definition sits underneath every number that follows.

The headline share barely moved

Across the thirteen editions from 2006/07 onward, the overseas contribution to Hong Kong turnover stayed inside a narrow band. It was 43.1% in 2006/07, peaked at 46.3% in 2009/10, troughed at 38.7% in 2013/14, and came in at 41.2% in 2020. A global financial crisis, a property collapse, a tech crackdown, street protests and a pandemic, and the number ends roughly where it started.

The composition that did change sits in the same table. Local investors fell from 52.8% of turnover in 2006/07 to 30.7% in 2020. Brokers trading their own book, rather than a client's, rose from 4.2% to 28.1% over the same period.

By the final edition, Hong Kong's brokers were moving almost as much stock on their own account as every Hong Kong investor put together.

Who the overseas money was

The 2016 edition still named countries. The UK was the largest overseas origin at 23% of overseas trading, Mainland China took second place at 22%, and the US slipped to third at 20%. By 2020 the survey reported blocs instead: Asia 47.7% of overseas trading, Europe 24.4%, the US 23.2%.

Reading those as a share of the whole market is more useful, because it removes the mainland-inflated denominator. American and European investors together came to 22.0% of Hong Kong turnover in 2016 and 19.6% in 2020. Asia, which contains Mainland China, went from 14.5% to 19.7%.

American and European participation held near 20% of the whole market across all four editions. The Asian bloc climbed through it, and the two drew level in the final edition ever published.

What arrived after the lights went out

Southbound Stock Connect turnover is still reported, because it runs through a dedicated channel that HKEX counts directly. Average daily Southbound trade value, buying and selling combined, was HK$10.8 billion in 2019 and HK$24.4 billion in 2020. It reached HK$48.2 billion in 2024 and HK$121.1 billion in 2025.

That is a fivefold increase since the last survey, in the one category the exchange can still see without asking anybody. Counting one side of each trade, as the survey did, Southbound alone now moves about HK$61 billion a day. The whole Hong Kong market averaged HK$87 billion a day in 2019.

The 2020 survey put Southbound at 8.6% of total market turnover. HKEX puts it at 23.0% of Hong Kong cash equities turnover at the end of the fourth quarter of 2025, against 20.9% a year earlier. Those two figures come from different years and different counting methods, so the move from 8.6% to 23.0% is a direction rather than a precise multiple.

The last time anyone counted, American and European investors traded less of Hong Kong than Southbound does today.

The asset-management figure that gets misread

One number is often produced to close this gap. The Securities and Futures Commission reported that 63% of Hong Kong's assets under management at the end of 2024 came from investors outside Hong Kong. Excluding Mainland China as well, the share was 54%. The regulator's own wording is that it has stayed above 54% in recent years.

That figure counts something else. Assets under management measure where capital is booked and managed. Turnover measures what actually trades on a given day. A stable mix of managed assets and a fivefold rise in Southbound turnover are not in conflict, because they are not counting the same thing. Neither one shows what proportion of yesterday's volume in Hong Kong came from New York or London.

What can be said, and what cannot

Two statements survive the evidence. Mainland participation went from 8.6% of turnover in 2020, on the survey's measure, to 23.0% at the end of 2025 on the exchange's. Both figures are counted directly rather than estimated. The American and European share has not been published since the 2020 edition. A claim that Western investors came back in 2025 rests on inference.

None of that argues Hong Kong is cheap or expensive, and it does not settle whether the buying is durable. It changes what a reader should accept as sourced. When a market narrative rests on who is buying, the honest position is to name the last date anybody counted. For Hong Kong that date is 2020, published in April 2022, three years before the record year it is now used to explain. The stocks in the market thesis pieces on this site trade in a market whose ownership is described from a five-year-old document.

The survey ran through the handover, the Asian financial crisis, the global one, and a pandemic. Its final edition covers the year Southbound turnover doubled.