Investors buy and sell shares using self-service machines installed at a stock brokerage on May 9 in Jinan, capital city of East China's Shandong Province.  [China Daily]

On a warm morning, loud cheers erupted sporadically from the crowd of elderly men and women who had their eyes glued on an array of half a dozen television screens. Last Friday, they were sitting in a stuffy room on the second floor of a nondescript office building in Shanghai.

Clutching a mobile phone in one hand and an electronic calculator in the other, a sweating man donning a short-sleeved shirt and baggy pants, mutters to himself: "Go, baby, go."

They are watching the live broadcast of real time changes in share prices on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, courtesy of Industry Securities, a large stock broking firm.

On the other side of the room are 32 self-service machines for the company's clients to buy and sell shares.

"Don't you think this place looks like a nursing home for old folks?" chuckles Chao Yin, Industrial Securities' deputy general manager. Some people who frequent the office are in their 80s and 90s.

Indeed, stock punting has become the biggest game in town as in the rest of the country enthusiastically played by people of all ages and income levels. There are reports that high-school students have formed investment groups to pump into shares, whose prices seem to defy the law of gravity.

Warnings of a bubble from officials and experts including the central bank governor recently seem to have fallen on deaf ears of people desperate to put their money in the red hot equities market that has been drawing in about 400,000 new players a day across the country.

At Chao's brokerage, about 40 to 50 people have opened accounts per day recently, the manager said. Last Friday, there were about 20 people waiting outside the room to enrol. Nearby, empty forms, about 40 kinds in four categories, were piled high on a table.

But retail investors frequenting the stock brokerages are a poorly-educated lot, with barely any knowledge of stocks and unaware of potential risks, Chao said.

"These individuals, especially new gamblers, are short of basic knowledge and barely know how to operate online or over the telephone, so they gather here every working day and make things messy," said Chao.

"We are under a great workload and pressure. We don't even have time to dine out or have enough sleep," he said, rubbing eyes with shadows beneath them.

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