Alibaba is used to setting records. 400m shoppers spent $30bn on its platform in a single day last year. This November investors, not shoppers, could be flocking to Hong Kong for shares of the Chinese ecommerce giant. It plans to list as early as November to raise up to $15bn after a delay earlier this year, Reuters reports. A float of this size would be a significant boost to the city’s equity markets. There is also an unexpected winner: Hong Kong's central bank. 

Hong Kong retail investors are able to borrow from a broker to subscribe to listings. If a flotation is oversubscribed, these “margin loans” can be many times the value of the shares on offer. In the case of last year’s blockbuster listing of Ping An Good Doctor, the $20bn advanced was more than 200 times the stock being sold by the Chinese healthcare platform.

Borrowing on this scale fuels demand — albeit temporarily — for HK dollars.  This would be a welcome change for the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA), which defends the currency’s peg to the US dollar, allowing it to trade between HK$7.75 and 7.85 per US dollar. Protests have depressed the HK dollar and encouraged hedge funds to bet against it. They reason that if unrest drives capital out of the city, the HKMA could use up its reserves defending the currency. That could force the peg to break.