The market has been going through continuous adjustments lately, yet within this turbulence, capital has been flowing in against the trend via ETFs.
As of October 29, ETFs tracking the ChiNext Index attracted a total net inflow of RMB 54.555 billion this month, of which the E Fund ChiNext ETF (159915) alone drew RMB 43.228 billion in cumulative inflows this month — the gloomier the market, the more real money concentrates along the growth mainline that is ChiNext.
And growth is precisely the story ChiNext has been telling for the past 17 years.
On October 30, 2009, in Shenzhen, the heads of 28 companies gathered at the Shenzhen Stock Exchange and rang the bell for their listing on ChiNext.
That year, this newly born board was given an English name — ChiNext, which literally translates to "China's board of the future."
Looking back 17 years later, this board has accompanied China's economy through a relay race about "growth."
The story begins in the late 1990s.
At that time, China's economy entered a period of transition, and a large number of innovative, growth-oriented technology companies began to emerge, yet there was still no capital market stage capable of catching them.
In August 1999, the Party Central Committee and the State Council explicitly called for "establishing a high-tech enterprise board in due course"; in 2000, the State Council decided to establish a ChiNext market.
What followed was a decade of gestation, until October 30, 2009, when the first batch of 28 companies listed on ChiNext.
The official positioning given to it was that it "was born in response to innovation and entrepreneurship, and is committed to serving the national strategy of independent innovation"; the targets it was meant to serve were "growth-oriented innovative and entrepreneurial enterprises."
Simply put, this is a board born for "growth."
What a board looks like can be seen from its largest few weighted stocks.
And over these 17 years, the protagonists of ChiNext have changed several times.
In the year the market opened, the highest market cap belonged to Lepu Medical — a pharmaceutical company; starting in 2012, environmental protection leader OriginWater took over the position of "market cap king"; by the second half of 2014, when the bull market began, East Money and LeTV, riding the tailwind of "Internet Plus," successively pushed their market caps past RMB 100 billion.
In June 2015, the top ten weighted stocks of the ChiNext Index were almost entirely swept up by a group of internet and media companies including East Money, LeTV, Huayi Brothers, and Wangsu Science & Technology; later, the story continued to turn, and around 2017, Wens Foodstuff Group — a breeding enterprise — took the position of largest weighted stock; then by 2019, CATL reached the top, bringing ChiNext into the era of "new energy plus pharmaceuticals"; and today, optical module leaders of the AI computing power era such as Zhongji Innolight, Eoptolink Technology, and T&S Communications have become the new protagonists.
The smooth passing of the baton among "growth" protagonists has been safeguarded by institutional arrangements.
On August 24, 2020, the registration-based IPO system reform for ChiNext was implemented, with the first batch of 18 companies listing.
This reform condensed ChiNext's positioning into "three innovations and four new things" — adapting to the broader trend of development relying more on innovation, creativity, and ingenuity, mainly serving growth-oriented innovative and entrepreneurial enterprises, and supporting the deep integration of traditional industries with new technologies, new industries, new business forms, and new models.
From "incremental reform" to "stock reform," the entire process was completed in less than four months.
If 2009 was its birth, then the 2020 reform was an important step on its path of growth.
So where has today's ChiNext "grown" to?
The answer lies in two sets of numbers.
The first set is scale.
The number of listed companies has grown from 28 to more than 1,400, and total market capitalization has increased from about RMB 140 billion on the first day of listing to more than RMB 15 trillion today.
The second set, and the one more worth watching, is profitability.
The average operating revenue of ChiNext-listed companies grew from RMB 326 million in 2009, the year the board opened, to RMB 3.259 billion in 2025, with a compound annual growth rate of about 15.48%; average net profit attributable to shareholders of the parent company rose from RMB 62 million to RMB 186 million, with a compound annual growth rate of about 7.11%.
Measured over 17 years, this is a genuinely upward curve — so-called "growth," in the end, means profits getting thicker year by year.
Right now, a round of adjustment has pushed valuations down.
Profit-taking after earlier large gains, combined with the pressure on growth stock valuations from rising overseas U.S. Treasury yields, pushed the ChiNext Index's price-to-earnings ratio down to about 29 times as of October 27, at the 7.36% historical percentile since the index's base date.
Yet on the earnings side, things have not moved down along with it — net profit attributable to shareholders of the parent company for the 2026 interim report still grew 39.21% year on year, and the profit growth rate of leading companies was generally above 40%.
Valuations are at a low level, while profits are still rising.
At a moment like this, fully corrected valuations, still-high profit growth, and gradually clearing筹码 have together formed signals that lean to the left side.
It should be noted that "left side" often means the bottom is a range, not a precise point — short-term repeated fluctuations, or even a bit more grinding, are all possible.
If you want to consider positioning along this "China technology growth" mainline, you can pay attention to the E Fund ChiNext ETF (159915); investors without stock accounts can look at the E Fund ChiNext ETF Feeder Fund (A/C/Y: 110026/004744/022907).
For 17 years, ChiNext's protagonists have changed several times, from pharmaceuticals and environmental protection, to "Internet Plus," and then to new energy and AI computing power.
But its original aspiration of "serving growth-oriented innovative and entrepreneurial enterprises" has never changed.
This "China board of the future" is still passing the baton.
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