Foreign money has fled Chinese stocks by the billions this month. JP Morgan says it's just a 'blip'

Investors stand in front of an electronic stock board at a securities brokerage in Shanghai, China, on May 30, 2018.

Qilai Shen | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Foreign investors have been fleeing Chinese stocks so far this month, but J.P Morgan Asset Management's head of Greater China Equities says those outflows are just "a blip."

Since the beginning of May, foreign money has pulled out from the Shanghai and Shenzhen markets through Hong Kong's Stock Connect platform, reportedly amounting to $7.56 billion of Chinese A-shares in the 20 trading sessions up to May 14.

J.P. Morgan Asset Management's Howard Wang put it down to investors cashing out first — due to uncertainty about escalating trade dispute between Washington and Beijing.

"It's understandable that investors will want to take some profit given the coming market volatility as a result of the U.S-China trade talks. So the way I look at it, the last couple of weeks, it's a blip," he told CNBC on Thursday.

Chinese markets had rallied earlier in the year on expectations of more stimulus for the cooling economy, and on signs that Beijing and Washington were making progress in talks to end their trade war. That's after a record slump of more than 24% in 2018 — the worst performance in a decade.

But fortunes turned again on a fresh deterioration in trade relations between the world's two largest economies: Chinese stocks fell the most in more than three years on the first trading session of May as investors scrambled to dump them.

However, Wang told CNBC that Chinese A-shares, or Chinese yuan-denominated mainland stocks, should see "substantial inflows" in the longer term.

Wang attributed that optimism to a few factors.

"It's a under-owned market, by definition ... It's a broad, deep and very, very large market, so there are plenty of opportunities for plenty of different types of investors," he said.

"So I'm not terribly worried about the last few billion dollars of outflows," Wang added. "I'm more anticipating the many many billion dollars of incremental inflows that we'll see over the next decade or so."

— Reuters contributed to this report.

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