Financial charts in everyday speculation: Mobile-app trading among retail investors in the Chinese stock market

Retail investors in China increasingly trade through mobile apps that stream prices, charts and alerts. Based on 15 months of ethnographic research across online groups and in-person follow-ups in multiple cities, I demonstrate how everyday speculation is sustained by practices grounded in structured market information in online trading apps. Instead of valuing firms, investors speculate graphically, treating charts as living maps that fold past traces, present ticks and imagined futures. I argue that these practices constitute a mode of reasoning for plausible market paths within the shifting spaces left by sizable market-making funds and regulatory interventions. The paper offers a culturally contextualized account of everyday speculation in a political economy in which regulators and political powers are read alongside visual, relational and situated indicators within China’s state-shaped market structure.