Societe Generale Lists 3x MiniMax Note, Long Side Only, Six Days After the Probe Selloff
A 3x long MiniMax note began trading on 29 September, six days after a data-probe selloff left the stock at HK$268.2. There is no short version, mainland buyers already hold 9.7%, and the company Beijing summoned but has not cleared just shipped a model with no price.
Vincent Jiang · 3 min read
Leverage arrives six days after the selloff
Societe Generale switched on a 3x long certificate on MiniMax (00100.HK, ticker SQIW.SG) on 29 September, in a batch that also covers Zhipu, GigaDevice and, from 7 October, Hua Hong Grace 1. All four notes are denominated in Singapore dollars, so the buyer takes Hong Kong exposure without converting currency 1.
The worked example on Longbridge's listing note prices entry at about S$200, against roughly S$10,000 for a board lot of the underlying shares 1. And the menu runs one way. The long side of MiniMax is for sale at three times leverage; the short side is not for sale at all, with no 3x short listed on any of the four stocks 1.
Summoned, not cleared
The listing landed six days after the probe-day selloff. On 23 September MiniMax closed down 6.4% at HK$268.2 and Zhipu fell 11.5%, on reports that Chinese regulators were examining whether large-model firms had fed sensitive user data into overseas systems 2. The trigger was Anthropic's 10 September report naming seven Chinese companies, MiniMax among them 3.
The Cyberspace Administration summoned all seven firms, then narrowed its questioning to DeepSeek and Moonshot 3. One account of the tally put MiniMax at 13 million Claude exchanges; wider reporting has not itemized the company's share 4. The combined count across the seven ran to roughly 190 million exchanges, more than 151 million of it attributed to Alibaba, which is not under inquiry 3. What holders carry is the risk of a widening, not a verdict: the regulator has set no timetable and named no penalties 3.
Mainland buyers already hold 9.7%
Mainland investors bought HK$10.6 billion (US$1.4 billion) of the stock through Stock Connect in August, more than Alibaba or Tencent, and hold a 9.7% stake built since the link opened on 6 August 6. The certificate stacks borrowed exposure onto that crowd at the exact price the selloff left behind 2.
The probe selloff left MiniMax at HK$268.2, where the new money got in
Data
| Value | |
|---|---|
| Zhipu | -11.52% |
| MiniMax | -6.35% |
| Alibaba | -4.36% |
| SenseTime | -3.56% |
| Xiaomi | -3.38% |
| Tencent | -2.75% |
| Kuaishou | -2.18% |
| Baidu | -1.01% |
Tokens without a price tag
The bull case is not a shrug. Chinese models took 57% to 67% of all tokens on OpenRouter in the week of 14 September, up from 6% to 13% in February; on Vercel their share rose to 55% in August from 11% in January 7.
Yet two days before the note went live, MiniMax turned on M3.1-Flash-Preview inside its own coding tool with no model card, no benchmarks and no price 8. The line it extends, M3, sells at $0.30 per million input tokens and $1.20 output, against Claude Sonnet 5 at $2 and $10 9. Developers had already fingerprinted a free anonymous model, Space Bunny Alpha, as a likely early MiniMax build, 24 probes out of 24 matching; the company has not confirmed it 9.
MiniMax's M3 undercuts Claude Sonnet 5 six- to eight-fold on token price
- Input
- Output
Data
| Input | Output | |
|---|---|---|
| MiniMax M3 | $0.3 | $1.2 |
| Claude Sonnet 5 | $2 | $10 |
Two doors: a widening probe, and Washington's committees
Watch two doors. Beijing's probe could stay at two firms or widen to the five others it summoned 3, and two US House committees are already investigating Chinese model adoption 7. If the widening comes, the note that went live on 29 September 1 sits at the front of it, three times over.
How this brief was made
01Gathered & sourced223 channels · 2,148 articles▾
Agents swept 223 channels and ingested 2,148 articles, then de-duplicated and ranked them for signal.
02Verified & cross-validated8 claims · 37 data feeds▾
Every one of 8 load-bearing claims was checked against primary sources, with 37 live data feeds reconciling the figures and charts.
- 1Longbridge, New Z AI, Minimax and GigaDevice 3x Long DLCs: Now Trading!, 29 September 2026
- 2ETNet, Alibaba drops over 4% below HK$110 as AI large model stocks slump collectively, 23 September 2026
- 3Yahoo News (citing The Information), China probes DeepSeek, Moonshot over user data sent to Anthropic, 23 September 2026
- 4Crypto Briefing, China probes DeepSeek and Moonshot over alleged data leaks to Anthropic, 22 September 2026
- 6Bloomberg, Minimax Emerges as Mainland China Investors' New Favorite Stock, 1 September 2026
- 7CNBC, Chinese AI models surge in global popularity, and Washington is worried, 25 September 2026
- 8StartupFortune, MiniMax quietly ships a coding-only model as China's AI models flood the market, 27 September 2026
- 9StartupFortune, MiniMax slips a new coding model into its agent tool without a price tag, 28 September 2026
03Reviewed & edited2 human editors▾
2 editors read the draft against the evidence, tuned the framing, and signed off before it shipped.
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AI-generated from this story and its cited sources. Not investment advice.


