ETFs Surpassing Active Equity Funds?

In the third quarter, the scale of ETFs continued to expand, with E Fund, Huaxia Fund, and Huatai-PineBridge Asset Management's non-monetary fund scale increasing by over 200 billion yuan each.

The stock market over the past quarter can be described as a roller coaster. Under the strong signal of policy intensification, investors' expectations for a continuous economic downturn have been reversed, and risk appetite has greatly increased, leading to a rapid rise in the market and a certain degree of overall valuation repair.

Accompanying the sharp rebound in the stock market, the public fund landscape has also undergone a turning point change. According to the statistics of the Minsheng Securities Research Institute, for the first time, the holding volume of passive funds in A-shares has surpassed that of active funds. The liability side of passive equity funds (new issuances + net subscriptions) has received a large amount of incremental funds for six consecutive quarters, while active equity funds have experienced net outflows for six consecutive quarters.

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From the perspective of fund managers, during the third quarter, ETF business has become an important variable in determining the scale ranking. E Fund, Huaxia Fund, and Huatai-PineBridge Asset Management have all seen their non-monetary scale increase by over 200 billion yuan during the third quarter. Huaxia Fund's non-monetary fund scale has officially broken through the 1 trillion yuan mark, and Huatai-PineBridge has leaped into the top ten of non-monetary fund scale with its ETF business. Companies with weaker or no ETF business布局, on the other hand, are left out of this ETF investment boom.

In addition to traditional equity and debt asset management businesses, the attitudes and pacing of public fund industry towards QDII, REITs, FOF, alternative investments, and other businesses vary greatly. Even for the top 20 medium and large companies in the industry, there are still many businesses that are still in a blank area.

He who gets ETFs gets the world?

Looking at the overall growth rate of public fund non-monetary fund scale during the third quarter, the four most eye-catching companies are E Fund and Huaxia Fund, which have both achieved continuous expansion on a large base, with non-monetary scale growth exceeding 200 billion yuan; Huatai-PineBridge's non-monetary scale growth rate is as high as 55%; Nanfang Fund's scale growth has also exceeded 100 billion yuan.

The scale growth of the above four companies all relies on the rise of their ETFs. The following table shows the latest list of the top 10 largest ETFs in the entire market:

From the above table, it can be seen that the largest ETFs are currently concentrated in ETFs tracking broad-based indices such as the CSI 300, SSE 50, CSI 500, STAR 50, ChiNext Index, and CSI 1000.Among them, the most aggressive expansion in scale is the CSI 300 ETF, which is dominated by products from Huatai-PineBridge, Yifangda, China AMC, and Harvest Fund, with Huatai-PineBridge's CSI 300 ETF leading in size, growing by 175 billion yuan from the end of June to now. Yifangda has three ETFs, namely the CSI 300 ETF, ChiNext ETF, and STAR 50 ETF, which together have achieved nearly 200 billion yuan in growth from the end of June to now. China AMC's three broad-based ETFs have also contributed nearly 150 billion yuan in scale growth. Southern Fund has achieved an increase of over 80 billion yuan with the CSI 500 ETF and the CSI 1000 ETF.

When ETFs become the winning engine for some companies, those lacking relevant business layout struggle with scale growth in the third quarter. The following table shows the specific growth of index funds and non-currency ETFs for the top 20 companies in the industry for the third quarter:

From the table above, it can be seen that many companies have an index fund growth scale of less than 10 billion yuan in the third quarter, among which Central European Fund and Xingzheng Global Fund do not have countable products in the ETF aspect.

According to statistics from the Minsheng Strategy Team, the liability side of passive equity funds (new issuance + net subscription) has received a large amount of incremental funds for six consecutive quarters. Under the joint action of the liability side and the asset side, the scale of passive equity funds holding A-shares exceeded the scale of active equity funds holding A-shares for the first time in the third quarter.

"New individual investors may have experienced a process from 'fear of missing the rise' to 'fear of losing returns', and for existing individual participants, 'recovery redemption' may be the main behavior at present, which is also one of the main disturbances in the current market transaction level. Considering that the scale of passive equity funds holding A-shares exceeded that of active funds for the first time in the third quarter of 2024, and in this round of the market, individual investors also participated a lot in the secondary trading of ETFs, the rise of ETFs will be one of the important variables to change the future market micro-pricing mechanism, such as: a package of transactions may increase the necessity of timing, and the arbitrage space brought by the deviation of primary and secondary pricing may affect the pricing of constituent stocks, etc." Minsheng Securities believes.

Active equity funds continue to net outflow

While ETFs are booming, active equity funds show a "the more they rise, the more they redeem" situation.

According to the third-quarter data, there are currently 27 active equity funds in the whole market with a scale of over 10 billion yuan (calculated separately for different shares), all of which recorded positive returns during the third quarter. However, looking at the share change rate, except for a small increase in the share of a holding period fund that has not yet reached the redemption condition, all products experienced net redemption during the third quarter.

From the table above, it can be seen that Yifangda Blue Chip Selection is still the largest active equity fund, with a net value increase of 15% during the third quarter, and a fund share reduction of 2.45%. The best performing fund among the 10 billion funds in the third quarter is the Guangfa Multi-Factor managed by Tang Xiaobin and Yang Dong, with a net value increase of 23% during the third quarter, and a fund share reduction of 6.63%.

According to statistics from the Minsheng Securities Strategy Team, the scale of new fund establishment in the third quarter has obviously declined, and the existing part continues to show a significant net redemption with a rebound in the redemption scale quarter-on-quarter, which is the sixth consecutive quarter of net outflow of funds from the liability side of active equity funds (new issuance + net subscription).Bond funds also experienced net redemptions

In addition to active equity funds experiencing net redemptions, the "stock-bond seesaw effect" at the end of the third quarter also led to varying degrees of redemptions in bond funds. The following table shows the subscription and redemption situation of bond funds with a scale of over ten billion (different shares are counted separately):

Out of 75 billion-yuan bond funds, excluding some regular open-ended funds, it can be seen that 28 funds have a negative share change rate, with only 16 funds achieving positive growth.

Wind data shows that the latest net asset value of bond funds in the entire market is 10.26 trillion yuan, a slight decrease of 3% compared to 10.59 trillion yuan at the end of June.

By sorting out the scale changes of various product lines of the top 20 fund companies in terms of non-monetary scale, it can be seen that most companies have experienced a reduction in the scale of bond funds during the third quarter. Only a few companies, such as GF Fund, Huatai-Pine Rich Fund, and CEF Fund, have seen positive growth in the scale of their bond funds.

Blank areas in emerging business layout

In addition to major asset classes such as stocks and bonds, we have also organized the changes in asset scale of alternative investments, QDII, FOF, and REITs of the top 20 companies during the third quarter:

From the table above, it can be seen that unlike traditional asset management businesses of stocks and bonds, the attitudes and layout pace of public fund companies towards QDII, REITs, FOF, and alternative investments vary greatly, with many companies still in a blank area in some businesses.

QDII is the largest category of assets, with Huaxia and Yifangda's scale increasing by more than ten billion during the third quarter. In terms of FOF, the largest entity is Xingye Global Fund, with a total asset scale of 17 billion yuan; CEF Fund's FOF increased by 3.7 billion yuan; Jia Shi Fund's FOF shrank by 2.6 billion yuan. In terms of REITs, only 9 out of the top 20 companies are involved, with Huaxia Fund being the largest in scale. In alternative investments, only Huaan Fund, Bosera Fund, and Yifangda Fund have a scale of over ten billion.

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