What we do

Interlect Analytics provides quantitative textual analytics services on macro policy, growth dynamics and market themes in China to help clients identify emerging trends ahead of the curve.

We develop proprietary text-based indicators that offer a compelling alternative for quantifying and forecasting economic and financial risks that are challenging to capture with conventional tools.

Our indices track a wide range of macro themes across a variety of policy texts and textual time series, the complexity of which makes manual analysis impractical for detecting sudden changes in topics in a timely fashion. This quantitative approach, coupled with rigorous numerical data analysis, also helps reduce emotional bias (e.g. confirmation bias), which is often present in analyses that rely on manual policy interpretation.

Our approach fills a gap left by conventional macro analysis on China, which primarily relies on traditional numerical data or manual qualitative interpretation of policies, often failing to capture significant episodes of risk in China’s markets early on despite early signs in the textual data.

For a free preview of our research notes, see QuickScan: The PBOC’s Optimistic Outlook, DeepDive: Signals from the Two Sessions and QuickScan: Taking Stock of Money Supply Developments.

Some of our (contrarian) calls:

January 16, 2023: We caution against expectations of a strong rebound in domestic consumption in 2023, as households are unlikely to significantly increase spending, with high deposits being more attributable to asset reallocation than to 'excess savings'.

January 4, 2024: We argue that Chinese exports will likely surprise to the upside, with industrials, especially export-driven ones, delivering a positive performance.

February 15, 2024: We turn cautiously optimistic on China macro, with potentially positive implications for Chinese equities (HSCEI).

Founder: Johannis Bayer

Johannis is the founder and managing director of Interlect Analytics, where he monitors China’s policy releases and economic and financial conditions, and develops quantitative text-based macro indicators to quantify and forecast trends that are challenging to capture with conventional tools.

Johannis has over a decade of industry experience as a top-level conference interpreter, serving many heads of state and government, ministers, regulators, and the C-suite of multinational companies at their meetings in China. This has given him a rare perspective on the policy-making processes and forces that shape China’s macroeconomy and market dynamics.

Johannis holds an MA in Asian Studies (Chinese) from the University of Cambridge and an MA in Conference Interpreting from Beijing Foreign Studies University. He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Melbourne, and also holds certifications in financial valuation and capital markets (FMVA® and CMSA®).