China's industrial profit growth slowed in June. Oil prices retreated. Earnings took a hit. Corporate China went from barely positive growth in 2025 to double-digit gains earlier this year and now we're back to slowdowns. This is what passes for a turnaround in 2026.
The narrative here is that oil prices sapped the earnings lift. Oil went down so profits went down. Brilliant analysis. Nobody could have predicted that when the thing that makes other things cost more stops making other things cost more, the people selling those other things make less money. This is why analysts get paid the big bucks.
Retail traders saw "double-digit gains" in the summary and immediately started researching which Chinese industrial ETFs to buy at the top. They missed the part where June already happened. They also missed the part where the gains already turned into slowdowns. But they definitely caught the part where a Bloomberg headline used the word "turnaround" and that was enough.
The funniest part is calling barely positive growth in 2025 a low point worth celebrating your way out of. Imagine bragging that you went from almost breaking even to double-digit gains to slowing again in the span of eighteen months. That's not a turnaround. That's a tire fire that briefly stopped smoking before reigniting.
Oil prices retreated so corporate earnings got sapped. When oil prices rise again, earnings will get lifted. When they fall, earnings get sapped. This is the entire analysis. The chart goes up, the chart goes down, and someone in Shanghai writes a report about it while someone in New York writes a headline about the report while someone in their mom's basement in Ohio decides this is the signal they've been waiting for.
June already ended two months ago but the data just came out so now we get to pretend it matters.
Photo by Camillo Corsetti Antonini on Unsplash
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