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The long-rumored departure of Qiu Dongrong is finally confirmed!

On July 21, Zhonggeng Fund announced that Qiu Dongrong will resign as fund manager of five products including Zhonggeng Value Navigator from July 19, 2024 due to personal reasons, and will no longer serve as deputy general manager of Zhonggeng Fund.

As early as May, there were reports that Qiu Dongrong might leave. At that time, Zhonggeng Fund began to recruit additional fund managers, and Qiu Dongrong no longer managed independently.

The "top stream" suffered a Waterloo

Public information shows that Qiu Dongrong graduated from the Department of Chemical Engineering and Technology of Tianjin University. He has worked as an electroacoustic engineer at Hongfa, a sales manager at Damin Food, and a researcher in the consumer products industry at Qun Yi International.

Qiu Dongrong joined HSBC Jinxin Fund in 2010. In September and November 2014, he became the fund manager of HSBC Jinxin Large Cap Equity A and HSBC Jinxin Dual-Core Strategy Mixed A respectively.

As of his departure at the end of April 2018, the two funds had achieved returns of 2 times and 1.11 times, with compound returns of 35% and 24% respectively, ranking 1st and 36th among similar funds.

After taking office as deputy general manager and chief investment officer of Zhonggeng Fund, Qiu Dongrong established five funds. As of July 19, the five products managed by Qiu Dongrong all had negative returns this year.

From the perspective of long-term performance, as of July 19, the returns of Zhonggeng Value Leader Mixed, Zhonggeng Small Cap Value Stock, Zhonggeng Value Flexible Allocation Mixed, Zhonggeng Value Quality One-Year Holding Mixed, and Zhonggeng Hong Kong Stock Connect Value Stock since their establishment were 115.61%, 100.75%, 90.75%, 39.76%, and -15.50%, respectively.

"A number of 'top-tier' funds have suffered a disastrous defeat this year, with the funds they manage suffering heavy losses. In the minds of fund investors, losing some money when buying funds is not a big problem. The most hateful thing is that other funds are skyrocketing, but yours has not increased much. This puts a lot of pressure on Qiu Dongrong." An industry insider commented on Qiu Dongrong's departure.

According to public data, Zhonggeng Fund was established in 2015. As of the end of the second quarter of 2024, the scale of public fund management was 18.972 billion yuan. All the funds under management were equity funds, with a total of 6 products. Before leaving, Qiu Dongrong managed products with a scale of 14.708 billion yuan, accounting for 77.52% of the company's total managed funds. It can be said that Qiu Dongrong's ability determines the future of Zhonggeng Fund.

It is worth noting that due to the mediocre performance in the past two years, Qiu Dongrong's management scale has continued to shrink. Data shows that as of the end of the second quarter, the total scale of Qiu Dongrong's managed funds was 14.708 billion yuan, which was 5.146 billion yuan less than the 19.854 billion yuan at the end of the first quarter.

The announcement shows that after Qiu Dongrong's resignation, four fund managers, Liu Sheng, Chen Tao, Wu Chenggen and Sun Xiao, will take over the five products originally managed by Qiu Dongrong.

On July 21, Qiu Dongrong said in his personal circle of friends, "In the past six years, we have experienced a tortuous growth process together. The value investment strategy system based on uncertainty pricing has also experienced constant challenges and continuous evolution. In the face of an uncertain market, we are also constantly moving forward bravely and continuously challenging new sources of excess returns. In terms of marketing and customer service, we always adhere to the fundamental starting point of 'real returns for investors', and hope to improve the returns of holders and reduce investment risks through counter-trend marketing and strict purchase restrictions at high levels."

Fund manager resignations

Data shows that as of July 22, 176 fund managers have chosen to resign in the past six months, including leading public fund management institutions with management scale exceeding 1 trillion yuan and small and micro public funds with management scale less than 10 billion yuan. Among them, there are many influential public fund "veterans".

On April 3, Fan Yan, the deputy general manager who had single-handedly supported Yuanxin Yongfeng, officially announced her resignation. On June 4, Jiang Feng, a veteran who had worked at Jianxin Fund for 17 years, resigned in a hurry, leaving behind the Jianxin Fengrui Preferred Fund, which was named after him and had been established for less than a year; on June 18, Guo Xiaowen, the former ace fund manager of Zhongyou Fund, officially announced her resignation due to "personal reasons."

In terms of tenure, Jiang Feng joined China Construction Bank Fund as early as 2007, and it had been 17 years until his resignation, and he had served as a fund manager for nearly 13 years; Fan Yan is even more of a veteran figure, having joined Yuanxin Yongfeng Fund in 2014, and has served for a total of more than 8 years.

As July begins, the number of high-performing fund managers leaving their jobs has increased. On July 12 alone, seven fund managers announced their resignations.

It is generally believed in the industry that the reasons for fund managers' resignation can be summarized into several categories: insufficient company incentives, high performance pressure, substandard assessment, inability to adapt to the investment research atmosphere, violations of laws and regulations, and other personal reasons. It is expected that the announcement of fund manager recruitment, resignation, and resignation will continue to be relatively frequent in the future.

According to statistics from Tonghuashun, as of July 22, 2024, there are 3,801 fund managers in the entire market. In terms of representative types, there are 1,554 equity-oriented fund managers; in terms of career length, there are 1,024 fund managers with 1-3 years of investment experience, and 423 fund managers with more than 10 years of investment experience; in terms of management scale, there are 1,136 fund managers with less than 500 million yuan, and 160 fund managers with more than 50 billion yuan.

Every large-scale change in personnel is a signal of the industry's self-exploration, self-adjustment, and self-innovation. At present, the fee reduction reform is deepening, and fund companies have to face the double blow of scale and management fee rate. Some fund companies' year-end bonuses for 2023 have not yet been issued, and some fund companies have been caught up in large-scale layoffs and wage arrears. If small and medium-sized public fund companies want to break through in the current environment, they not only need to improve their asset allocation capabilities and investment levels, but also need to reserve more high-quality talents.