Fund managers are facing a "baton" assessment to boost morale, with market funds short-term or preferring benchmark component stocks.

At the beginning of this month, the China Securities Regulatory Commission issued the "Action Plan for Promoting the High-Quality Development of Public Fund", comprehensively establishing an industry assessment and evaluation system with fund investment returns as the core. In consideration of the long-term interests of investors, the "Action Plan" emphasized the performance benchmark of public fund products being "illusory" for many years, and explicitly stated the need to "strengthen the constraint role of the performance benchmark". Therefore, as the "baton" for fund managers' performance evaluation, the performance benchmark will also be revitalized. Recently, several public fund professionals interviewed by Securities Times reporters all expressed that this measure will profoundly change the underlying operational logic of actively managed equity products. With a long-term assessment mechanism, public funds will focus more on the stability of product investment returns while pursuing excess returns, and the importance of value investing will be more prominent. In terms of product layout, public funds will further increase the allocation of index products, and index products are expected to continue to be an important direction for the layout of public funds.