Guests attend the debut ceremony of China's sci-tech innovation board (STAR market) at the Shanghai Stock Exchange in Shanghai, east China. China's sci-tech innovation board (STAR market) started trading on the Shanghai Stock Exchange Monday morning, with the first batch of 25 companies debuting on the board.Photo:Xinhua 

The financial markets in China still offer some of the best opportunities for many overseas investors whose interest in investing in Chinese bonds and equities remain "very strong", Joyce Chang, chair of global research at J.P. Morgan said on Thursday, based on discussions the bank has had with corporate clients and institutional investors. 

Investors retain their interest at a time when China continues to open up its financial markets despite shadows cast by the trade tensions it has with the US, a harmful factor for China's as well as the world's economy. 

J.P. Morgan last month added Chinese government bonds to its widely followed benchmark emerging-market indexes, which, together with other mainstream indexes, Chang predicted would potentially usher in a fresh and sizeable overseas influx of about $250-300 billion capital into the world's second-largest bond market.

The inclusion will be phased in over a 10-month period starting February 2020, the company said in a statement in September. 

China and the US have been mired in a trade war for more than one year and recent signs have shown that the confrontation may even spill over into the financial markets. A Bloomberg report in late September noted that US government officials are discussing ways to limit US investors' portfolio flows into China that would have repercussions for billions of dollars in investment pegged to major indexes. 

But according to Chang, the market is in a wait-and-see mode when it comes to the changing status of the China-US political relations. 

"It (the trade war situation) does not impact the way that we have looked at the (Chinese bonds) and or our decision (to include Chinese government bonds in our indexes), which are very much based on the steps that China has taken to open its domestic markets and to address the concerns (such as bond liquidity accessibility) we use as criteria to judge whether any country's bonds go into the indexes," Chang told the Global Times on Thursday. 

She said that investors are strongly interested in Chinese bonds because China, along with some of emerging markets, is offering a yield pickup compared with the largely negative yields in many developed markets. 

"Emerging markets are getting more attention because other alternatives are becoming less compelling in relevant terms," she said. 

The 5-year China government bond had a yield of slightly more than 3 percent as of press time. 

Chang forecast that China's economy will slow further as a result of the trade tensions, with GDP of 6.2 percent in 2019 and 5.8 percent in 2020, while the US economy will also be hit accordingly by the trade uncertainties.