October 29 was the kind of session China's A-share traders will remember for a year. The ChiNext index collapsed 4.45%, the STAR 50 lost 4.27% and the Shenzhen Component slid 2.92%. The Shanghai Composite, held up by bank heavyweights, closed just 0.82% lower - the most decent-looking number on the board, and the most misleading one.
The breadth was brutal
Turnover ran at roughly 1.56 trillion yuan. Our close-of-day pull of the full-market advance/decline split counted 708 gainers against 4,563 decliners, with 56 unchanged - more than 85% of all listed stocks finished red. Some 272 names fell more than 9% while only 51 rose more than 9%, a five-to-one gap. This was not two-way trading; it was a stampede out of anything growth-flavored, concentrated in the small and mid caps the big indexes no longer carry.
The sentiment index barely flinched
Here is the strange part. We scraped 24 hours of retail comments from East Money's stock bars (2,938 usable posts in the window, plus 25 from Sina's bars for a 2,963-sample composite) and ran them through our polarity model. The composite sentiment index landed at 50.8 - bulls 17.1% versus bears 17.0%, which works out to 508 comments against 504. A coin flip. And 65.8% of commenters said nothing directional at all. The 48-hour comparison reading is 51.0: a 4.45% ChiNext crash moved the needle by 0.2 points.
Who got blamed, who got bought
The angriest threads clustered on CICC (sentiment 37.2 across 155 mentions), Tianfu Communication (42.5), Eoptolink (44.1), Unitree (45.0) and Zhongji Innolight (46.4). Three of the five most-bashed names are optical-module suppliers - last quarter's untouchable winners, now the crowd's favorite punching bags. CICC took the wooden spoon with 55 bearish posts against 11 bullish.
At the other end, retail affection went to Dongbei Group (57.5), Western Metal Materials (56.8) and Shanghai Hugong (55.7) - a clean sweep of commercial-aerospace and military-materials names. The most-mentioned keyword of the day was commercial aerospace (48 mentions), ahead of Xiangyang Bearing (47). The stocks that fell hardest got talked about most; the theme just catching fire got bought. An old script, still running.
Two readings of the same tape
Camp one calls it numbness: 508-versus-504 is not conviction, it is trapped holders who cannot move, and the 65.8% neutral bloc is the silence of the buried. Camp two calls it a golden pit: the index only fell 0.82% because banks were bought, sentiment refuses to break 50, and chips have not loosened - the first stabilization signal turns today's silent majority into chasing fuel.
Our data takes no side. 50.8 is, quite literally, a number that cannot decide. Which camp are you in?
Yijinmoming Finance - a daily retail-sentiment digest for China's A-share market, built on scraped public comments from East Money and Sina stock bars plus exchange breadth data. Sentiment index: bullish minus bearish share of posts, normalized 0-100, where 50 is neutral.
Method: comments scraped Oct 29, 20:51-20:53 local time over a rolling 24-hour window (Oct 28 20:51 - Oct 29 20:51); index and breadth data from East Money and Sina quote interfaces. Nothing here is investment advice. Markets carry risk.
Source: Yijinmoming daily sentiment report, Oct 29, 2026 edition.
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