Driven by big crowds and perceived signs of economic recovery, bidding was frenetic for the variety of stalls, with those serving fast food drawing the heftiest offers.

The end result was that all 475 stalls up for grabs in the seven-day Victoria Park fair were snapped up quickly and expensively.

That left government bean counters smiling over a pot of HK$11.16 million, or almost double what the auction of stalls brought in (HK$6.72 million) for the arrival of this Year of the Ox.

The auction is traditionally regarded as a weather vane for the larger economy, offering as it does signs of market sentiment and the gut feeling of traders who are able to size up the general mood to come. The indication is particularly important this year amid doubts over whether the financial rebound and the roaring trades that followed it in the property and stock markets are sustainable.

Three weeks on and with the ink on stall contracts barely dry, people are starting to worry there is a bit of a croak in the Tiger's roar - that those who paid top dollar for prime fast-food sites have bitten off more than they can chew.

Or what their customers can chew, you could say.

Consider: a veteran named Hui, who won fast-food stall A with a HK$490,000 bid, must sell more than one skewer of fishballs every two seconds if he's to stay out of the red. And this veteran of the business is now said to be doubtful of such an achievement from a stall that measures 6.6 meters by 4.8m, no matter how well positioned it is for the crowds.

Another veteran of Victoria Park, a man named Lam, offers cold-eyed readings in the basics of the fast-food business.

With a skewer of five to seven fishballs costing about HK$3 and selling for HK$10, he says, Hui will make or break in the last two days of the fair. That's when 70 percent of sales are made.

With rents working out to HK$171,500 for each of these two peak days, Hui will have to sell at least 24,500 skewers on each of them. If he opens the stall for 12 hours each day, he must sell 2,041 skewers for every one of those hours. That's 34 for each minute, or more than one skewer every two seconds.

And that is just to break even!

Such projections likely kept Yip Siu-wah, Hui's partner at this year's fair, from trying to ride the Tiger. For Yip didn't become known as "Fishball King" by biting beyond his means.

False dawn

He had sold fishballs and other hot snacks from stall A for more than a decade. But he turned his back on bidding for the Tiger fair because he considered gains in the property and stock markets to be a false dawn for a financial rebound.

Yet Hui must have found the experience with Yip this year rewarding, or he may have been carried away by the possibilities of running his own show.

In any case, the low-key operator was giving nothing away after winning the auction with a price that was a 10-year high.

Hui put his chances at making a profit at 50-50 amid the immediate post- auction clamor about the size of his winning bid. "It's like gambling at a sic bo table," he has said, referring to the "big and small" dice game.

Three weeks on, Yip reckons Hui is "kind of regretting his decision to make the bid" and has admitted to being "carried away by the keen atmosphere."

While Hui is hardly a newcomer to the business, his Victoria Park experience is restricted to that joint venture with Yip. Hui sells hot snacks in shops in Tsuen Wan, Tai Kok Tsui and Jordan and has more than two decades of experience. "He's considered a master in the business," Yip said. "Even I defer to him as a senior."

Yet Yip rates Hui's chances of making money at the fair as very slim, and "if it rains he is doomed."

Yip and Hui won the auction for stall A at this year's fair with a bid of HK$350,000.

That price took him to his ceiling, Yip said, and they barely broke even when the fair closed in the opening hours of the Year of the Rat.

That, of course, was at the depths of the economic crisis, when consumer confidence was at a low and companies were cutting back with a vengeance.

But Yip was not going to take chances this time around.

"Those buying penthouses for HK$70,000 per square foot are not the kind to be eating fishballs at New Year fairs," he pointed out. "Our customers are mostly young people, and the unemployment rate is still more than 20 percent for that population segment."

Scientific inclination

Yip's street-smart thinking is backed by readings from those with a more scientific inclination.

"A little too bold," says Francis Lui Ting-ming of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology about Hui's HK$490,000 call.

"A recovery is on the way," Lui believes, "but is the increased spending enough to cover the increased cost of the rent? He will need to make at least HK$140,000 more than last year just to break even."

In fact, Hui could be looking at more than a financial loss. He might have to turn his attention to what to do with a mountain of fishballs. For based on a premise of six fishballs per skewer, Hui may have 20,000 more skewers, or 120,000 fishballs, in his unsold inventory.

If he can't sell them at his permanent stalls, perhaps he can bite on his own products. But could he manage, say, 20 fishballs a day? For 16 years? Because that is how long it would take to be rid of them.

There are other uncertainties that can affect spending patterns in the coming two months and which might have a bearing on what Hui might have on his plate.

Lui, director of the HKUST's Center for Economic Development, points to a couple.

For one, the human swine flu pandemic has created pent-up demand for travel, so people may decide to spend the festive period overseas. Another: sales of luxury goods traditionally recover faster during a rebound compared to products such as fishballs.

Hui is not alone in worrying about prospects of recouping an investment in the Tiger fair.

A group of Secondary Six business students at Tseung Kwan O's QualiEd College had to come up with HK$21,000 for a stall at Victoria Park after a HK$14,000 outlay last time out.

And the extra cost has not meant an upgrade in location: their stall will adjoin the site they had this year.

The college's students have run dry goods stalls at Victoria Park since 2004, an activity embraced as a valuable hands-on learning experience.

But the higher bid required at auction along with increases in the cost of goods have chief school affairs master Yan Pat-to worried.

"It's like the Chinese saying 'you get hit 30 times before even seeing the official.' We have already had to come up with HK$7,000 more and that's even before we started filling our inventory."

So the students are now trying to figure ways to lower costs because they fear the perceived economic rebound is not strong enough for them to raise prices.

One advantage they see is that love will be in the air as the fair goes into its closing hours early on February 14.

For besides that being the first day of the Year of the Tiger it is also, of course, Saint Valentine's Day. So they are working on product lines that will help them to make the most of beliefs for both occasions.