Besides the hilariously fabricated economic data and the whole central planning bit – both of which are now everywhere these days – the one most notable feature about China’s economy and capital markets are the constantly rolling, bursting and resurrecting asset bubbles: from housing, to stocks, to bonds, to commodities, to cryptocurrencies, to pretty much anything that isn’t nailed down and can be traded, and back to housing again, the lifecycle of a Chinese assets is best expressed in terms of its “tulipness”: how long before the swarming horde of Chinese bubble-chasers, armed with over $35 trillion in closed-capital account credit, latches on, bids it to the stratosphere, then sends it crashing only to repeat the cycle from scratch. And since these bubbles come ever faster and ever more furious, one has to be lightning fast to get in (and out) before it’s all over.

One such place where “if you blink, you missed it” is China’s Zhengzhou Commodity Exchange, the location of what Bloomberg has called China’s “wildest commodity trade” du jour: the buying, and selling, but mostly buying (for now) of ferrosilicon contracts. Trading in futures of the little known commodity – an alloy used to harden steel – exploded this week, as humans became veritable HFT vacuum tubes, with the average contract on Wednesday held for an estimated 39 minutes, according to Bloomberg calculations, as “investors” scrambled to buy just so they could immediately flip it to another greater fool.

And as the chart below shows, a whole lot of greater fools suddenly emerged at the start of the month.

Incidentally, the tenure of oil contracts on the NYMEX is an ancient 47 hours.

As Bloomberg’s Alfred Cang reports, “Ferrosilicon is just the latest commodity contract pounced on by China’s hordes of speculators with an intensity that makes the world’s most liquid markets look leisurely. In repeated bouts of manic trading over the past year, they’ve piled in and out of everything from cotton to zinc, eventually prompting regulators to step in and calm the frenzy.”