The pressure of recent stock market fluctuations apparently contributed to depression that overwhelmed a fund manager in Beijing who fell to his death in a suspected suicide.News on the death of Liu Qiang, a 36-year-old fund manager at Ruilin Jiachi, emerged on July 24, via social media accounts.Three days later, a lawyer representing Liu's relatives stated Liu's death occurred on July 21 and was unrelated to the performance of the fund he managed or recent stock market fluctuations.Liu's early beginnings as a trader traced the growth of the Chinese capital markets.He was one of the first professional stock traders to participate in the country's then-budding futures market during the 1990s.Several people close to Liu say he had been fighting severe depression for years, and only returned to work in April after receiving treatment in the southwestern province of Yunnan.Liu's friends said he had grown frustrated by government measures used to support the mainland stock markets.A blog entry written by Liu on July 7 highlighted a sense of crisis in which he stated that the stock market disaster overturned his faith in trading on the analysis of fundamentals such as company balance sheets.Police did not issue a statement on Liu's death.For Caixin Online, this is Diana Bates.
