Former teenage soldier hatches millions from Chinese egg futures

Shanghai

A DECADE ago, Zhang Xiongjie was a teenage infantryman patrolling China's bleak border with North Korea.

Now he stays in swanky hotels and drives a Mercedes Benz CLS - a remarkable rags-to-riches journey achieved in part by dominating one of the most obscure corners of China's unruly financial markets: egg futures.

The story of how he earned so much money, so fast - 600 million yuan (S$132.3 million), he says, in 2014 - highlights the casino-like nature of China's nascent futures markets, and the vulnerability of such markets to a destabilising rout.

Mr Zhang trades on his own account and Reuters was not able to independently verify his earnings. "Us poor people, when we are born, we're impov…