China’s Gen Z Dons Spooky Stock Market Costumes for Halloween

November 02, 2026 at 09:20 AM GMT+8

China’s young investors have turned a stock market rout into Halloween jokes.

For a whole generation, the country’s stock market, down about 20% from a June high, has turned scary enough to inspire costumes worthy of mingling with zombies and monsters. Turning their misfortune into party inspiration, people dressed as index charts or trading platform screens surfaced across social media.

The costumes were spotted among festive crowds gathered in the central areas of China’s biggest cities over the weekend.

In Hangzhou, a tech hub in eastern China, a woman was photographed sporting a display of a candlestick chart of the plummeting Shanghai Composite Index. The getup was made complete with a handful of leeks in reference to internet slang for naïve retail investors who are repeatedly “harvested” in the market.

In Shenzhen, a costume featured a box over a person’s head displaying big drops in the Shenzhen Composite Index and the tech-heavy STAR Composite Index. Another person dressed as a falling candlestick chart emblazoned with the words “Tonghuani,” a play on the stock-trading app Tonghuashun that replaces the character for “smooth” with one meaning “adverse.” The person also held up his phone showing the slogan “Stay away from scam markets.”

“I’m so scared of what might happen on Monday that I can’t fall asleep,” one person wrote on Weibo early Monday. “It’s 10,000 times scarier than ghosts during Halloween.”

The stock-market costumes weren’t unique to China. In the US, people poked fun at falling shares as the outlook for tech stocks turned gloomier in recent weeks after a spate of earnings reports threw into question the eventual return on artificial intelligence spending.

As of late October, the situation is even more acute in China, where the world’s second-largest equities market has lost $3.5 trillion in value from a peak in May. Consumer spending remains persistently sluggish at a time when worries over the AI trade roil global stocks. The onshore benchmark CSI 300 Index entered into a bear market before finishing the month with the steepest decline in more than a decade.

Chinese stocks advanced on Monday following media reports that regulators will meet with banks and securities firms to discuss measures to support the capital market, signaling authorities’ renewed effort to halt the slump.