The HK$775M placeholder - we don’t believe in coincidences and we haven’t believed in this one.

As we wrote about yesterday, average daily table revenues for Macau came in at HK$775 million for last week.  Hmmm, where have we seen that number before?  Oh yeah, 14 times over the past 105 weeks.  If you’re saying to yourself, “that’s next to impossible”, well, it gets even more unlikely.  The weekly revenues released each of those 14x divides to a daily number of exactly HK$775,000,000 when carried out to the full decimals. 

So what is happening?  Clearly, HK$775 million is a placeholder, probably because not all the data came in to the government in time.  Statistically, that means that the following week’s data is likely to be volatile since it will be a catch up.  We calculate a standard deviation that is 40% higher for the week following a HK$775 million week than for the average week over the same period.

As if Macau stocks need another dose of volatility.