Recently, the trading circle has been talking about Japan's interest rate hike again, claiming that on December 19th, the Bank of Japan will announce a rate increase, and exaggerating stories about arbitrage funds rushing to withdraw and financial markets experiencing turbulence. I specifically checked the data, and this story isn't as exaggerated as it seems.

Japan has been taking action since 2024, with four rate hikes last year, gradually increasing from -0.1% to 0.25%, and then raising to 0.5% in January this year. The rate hike cycle is still ongoing. But from a global perspective, this interest rate level is still very low.

There's a logical issue here: if arbitrage funds are so sensitive and would withdraw as soon as they detect a rate hike signal, then when the rate hike cycle just began two years ago, funds should have already exited. Why wait until now? The funds that already flowed out earlier, now being used to hype up a "mass exodus" story, clearly doesn't make much sense.

Industry estimates suggest that even if some funds do withdraw, the scale would be around 2 trillion yuan. In the context of the huge size of the global financial markets, this number doesn't constitute a systemic shock. Instead of following the hype, it's better to look at real data to see the actual fund flows. The market is never short of stories, but genuine trading opportunities in real money require you to discover and verify them yourself.