In a bull market everyone’s a mathematician; in a bear market, everyone’s a philosopher. Conglomerates, the theory goes, just can’t cut it in a really depressed environment. As they live and breathe on booking gains from recycling assets, they suffer when deal flow falters. The supposed benefits of diverse income streams evaporate, meanwhile, when the world is in the grip of synchronised recessions.

This is true of Hutchison Whampoa, Hong Kong’s telecoms-to-oil group. After 32 years of shuffling the pack, it has a more cyclical hand than it would like – retail and ports are its number one and three segments by revenue. Some of its wildcards, 200m sq ft of billable mass residential development across 17 Chinese cities, also look a little dog-eared. Since markets folded last autumn, Hutch’s price/earnings premium to the Hang Seng has been replaced by a discount.