FinanceAsia readers expect Chinese stockmarket to outperform

In our first weekly poll this year, we asked our readers which of the region's stockmarkets they expect will provide the biggest returns in 2010. The answer was China.

Of the 189 respondents to the poll on our website, 30% said China will be the top market in Asia this year. This was well head of the second most popular choice -- Vietnam -- which got 14% of the votes. Hong Kong, India and Indonesia followed with 13%, 12% and 10% of the votes respectively. No other country received more than 6% of the votes.

The least popular markets this year, according to this quick poll, are Singapore and Thailand, which received a mere 2% of the votes each.

The results are not reflected in the actual performance of Asian markets so far this year. In fact, China and Vietnam are two of the worst performers in the first couple of weeks with China's CSI 300 Index down 2.1% and the Ho Chi Minh Stock Index off 1.5%.

Two of the top performers, with gains of 5.4% and 4.2% respectively, are Pakistan and Sri Lanka, neither of which was included among the 11 major markets in Asia ex-Japan that we asked our readers to choose from. The top gainer so far among those 11 countries is Indonesia, which as of January 18 was up 4.3%.