By Tom Westbrook and Samuel Shen

SINGAPORE/SHANGHAI, Feb 19 (Reuters) - Six Little Dragons, Seven Sisters and the Terrific Ten. These are some of the nicknames being bestowed on China's cast of home-grown heroes as they take on the U.S. tech goliaths, known as the Magnificent Seven.

In a rivalry of comic-book proportions, a surge in Chinese tech stocks has inspired brokerages to dream up catchy monikers to fire the imagination of retail investors.

Technology stocks are soaring in Hong Kong thanks to buzz around AI startup DeepSeek and a meeting between President Xi Jinping and tech business leaders including Alibaba founder Jack Ma, which has been seen as a sign of implicit state support.

The rally has vaulted the Hang Seng index .HSI near to the top of the best performing major markets this year and put leading stocks under the spotlight alongside the "Magnificent Seven" U.S. giants.

"Seven Sisters are waiting to step out of the attic," said the headline of a Haitong Securities research note this week.

They will likely emerge in the artificial intelligence, chip-making and high-end manufacturing sectors, the brokerage said.

Haitong did not identify the "Seven", but put online giant Tencent 0700.HK, e-commerce firm Alibaba, tech conglomerate Xiaomi 1810.HK, and automaker BYD in a list of likely candidates.

The "Terrific Ten" gained traction last year as the once-shunned stocks started making a comeback. There is still conjecture about its membership, though Jeff Weniger, head of equity strategy at WisdomTree Asset Management, said in a post on X this week that their performance was "crushing the Magnificent 7".

His "Ten" are Alibaba and JD.com 9618.HK, automakers Geely 0175.HK and BYD 1211.HK, Xiaomi, Tencent and NetEase 9999.HK, Baidu 9888.HK, Meituan 3690.HK and chipmaker SMIC 0981.HK.

They have powered the Hang Seng Tech index .HSTECH to an almost 70% gain over the last 12 months, compared with a 27% rise for Nasdaq .IXIC.

The Magnificent Seven consist of Alphabet GOOGL.O, Amazon AMZN.O, Apple AAPL.O, Meta META.O, Microsoft MSFT.O, Nvidia NVDA.O and Tesla TSLA.O, and the term was coined by Bank of America strategist Michael Hartnett in May 2023.

The title refers to the 1960 Western about seven gunslingers starring Steve McQueen, Yul Brynner and Charles Bronson.

Andrew Xia, chief economist at Shangshan Capital Group, said the "Terrific Ten" originated from a collection of 10 novels by British author David Walliams, and also possibly refers to a team of Chinese comic book superheroes in the DC Comics Universe.

Meanwhile, investment bank UBS labels eight AI-driven hot Chinese stocks "VENUS Eight", and among unlisted companies, DeepSeek is one of the six "Little Dragon" startups out of the city of Hangzhou.

(Reporting by Tom Westbrook and Samuel ShenEditing by Vidya Ranganathan and Helen Popper)

((tom.westbrook@tr.com; +65 6973 8284;))