Long life, little guys! Do you know which country has the highest stock turnover in the world? Bingo! Taiwan stock market has for many years maintained an annual turnover rate as high as 200%. Three million individual investors contributes to the high liquidity and volatility of the market. Housewives, office workers, teachers, college students, retirees, taxi drivers, groceries store owners, street hawkers --- almost all walks of life are included. Taiwan is a country with great momentum. Her stock market certainly proves it. Thru uncounted ups and downs in the market, the big elephants die away one by one, yet the little guys are still there and its number only gets bigger. Long life, guy-s! Derivatives are yet to be learned--- Despite with high liquidity and volatility, Taiwan stock market offers few derivative securities for risk hedging. Currently available in the market are stock options and index futures. Thanks to the bullish atmosphere in 1999, call options are gaining momentum. And yet investor education on how options work needs to be improved. With respect to the index futures, few players and low trading volume make the market far from efficient. S&P Asian Pacific Index 100 Standard & Poor first introduced the Asian Pacific Index 100 in September 1999. Taiwan stock market is included in the Index along with six other country markets: Australia, Newzealand, Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea and Malaysia. Ten industry sectors are covered by the Index. In the IT, or information technology, sector alone, seven Taiwan companies all together take up more than 90% share. Two other companies, one South Korean and one Singaporean, share the rest 10%. Now, I guess it somewhat explains why the Taiwan earthquakes scared down the NASDAQ. Tax Cut and Bad Debts Althouth Taiwan has proudly dodged the Asian financial crisis, bad debts of Taiwan's financial institutions are getting worse. To deal with the bad debts problem, Taiwan government introduced a tax cut proposal by reducing the bank businese tax from 5% to 2%. The tax savings are not for banks to raise their bottomlines, but to be reserved specifically for writing off bad debts. Well, how do you like such idea? Some people think it quite creative; others think it just a clever excuse for the governmen to subsidize banks' operation failure.