Recently pulling up the fund company index reveals a surprising result: HSBC Jintrust Fund Management Co., Ltd. ranks second from the bottom. This is quite unexpected, as the firm has long been viewed as a prominent, "small but beautiful" equity-focused fund house. Looking at the past few years, the pressure has indeed been substantial.
A closer look at the "fund manager index" essentially gives a feeling of a complete rout.
However, HSBC Jintrust is not a small company that has simply declined. Established in 2005 as a joint venture between Shanxi Trust and HSBC, it even produced a champion equity fund in its early years. But connecting the dots over recent years reveals its difficulty is not a temporary setback. Instead, it stems from a once-clear investment research line being severed, with no way to stitch it back together.
The Era of Qiu Dongrong: The Company's Soulful Days
Discussing the glory of HSBC Jintrust inevitably involves one person: Qiu Dongrong. In September 2010, he joined from CIMB International as a researcher, starting from the ground up as a stock sector analyst and rising to Head of Equity Investment and General Manager Assistant. However, the period of mutual success for him and the company truly began after 2014.
In September 2014, Qiu took over the HSBC Jintrust Large Cap Fund, and in November, he also took over the HSBC Jintrust Dual Core Strategy Fund. At that time, these two products were, without exaggeration, the backbone of the entire company. The combined assets under management for these two funds peaked at over 15 billion yuan, while the firm's total non-money market fund scale was only around 21 billion yuan—Qiu alone carried over 70% of the company's non-money AUM.
More important than the numbers was that he brought a truly replicable investment research language, not reliant on individual flashes of insight.
PB-ROE: The Company's Cornerstone Framework
Qiu's core framework was the PB-ROE valuation system—essentially using PB (price-to-book) to measure how much one pays for a unit of profitability (ROE), seeking targets in the market with low PB, identifiable fundamentals, and sufficient risk compensation. He repeatedly emphasized several hard principles: returns can only come from the asset's own profits and cash flows, not from trading games; valuation (price) determines expected return—true cheapness leads to high expectations; and risk management is the cornerstone of the entire system, as the future cannot be precisely predicted, requiring one to "correctly bear risk" within a target range.
The HSBC Jintrust Large Cap Fund rose 35% in the 2015 stock market crash and still achieved a positive return of 6.46% in the 2016 circuit breaker year. This wasn't due to Qiu having market timing magic, but rather the discipline of low valuation, high safety margins, and avoiding poor-quality companies that naturally made the portfolio resilient to declines. Institutional investors valued this exact point: consistency between words and actions, controllable drawdowns, and long-term compound interest. The proportion of institutional holders remained above 50% for a long time, earning it the nickname "institutional true love." During those years, the story HSBC Jintrust told externally was very clear: this was a joint-venture public fund with a methodology and values.
2018: The Cost of Losing Its Soul
On April 28, 2018, Qiu Dongrong announced his resignation due to "personal reasons," moving to the then-startup personal fund house, Zhonggeng Fund, as Deputy General Manager and CIO.
The consequences were almost immediate. The scale of the HSBC Jintrust Large Cap Fund plummeted from 5.9 billion yuan at the end of Q1 to 2.67 billion yuan by the end of Q3, cut in half. The Dual Core Strategy Fund also dropped from 7.7 billion yuan to 5.57 billion yuan. The two products combined shrank by approximately 5.4 billion yuan, accounting for nearly 90% of the company's total non-money AUM contraction. Following Qiu out the door was his former deputy, Cao Qing, who helped build the system and served as Deputy Head of Equity Research.
The person left, but the PB-ROE framework remained printed in company brochures. However, no one could truly operate it effectively anymore. An investment research system—you might think it's an institution, but it's actually a person—more precisely, the muscle memory and market credibility honed over a decade within that individual.
Lu Bin's "Transitional Glory": Winning the Championship, Losing the Transformation Window
After Qiu's departure, HSBC Jintrust placed its bets on a young talent it had cultivated internally: Lu Bin, a Fudan University graduate promoted from intern to assistant researcher to researcher to fund manager. It must be admitted that Lu Bin delivered an exceptionally brilliant performance in 2020: the HSBC Jintrust Low Carbon Pioneer Fund he managed returned 134.41% for the year, winning the championship for stock funds that year. The Intelligent Manufacturing Pioneer Fund also delivered 128.65%, ranking at the top. The super beta of new energy plus his courage to heavily invest against the trend at the bottom created another highlight moment for HSBC Jintrust.
The problem, however, is that the nature of this glory was completely different from the Qiu Dongrong era. Qiu's alpha came from a systematic low-risk pricing and discipline framework—even after he left, the skeleton remained. Lu Bin's success came from a concentrated bet on a super sector and extremely strong research execution. In essence, it was a "single-point genius eruption," not a replicable platform capability.
Even more critically, after the championship win, the company顺势 promoted Lu Bin as the "face of the company"—appointing him as General Manager Assistant, Investment Director, managing 7 products, with AUM once exceeding 34 billion yuan. However, once new energy entered a valuation correction phase, this path dependence became a shackle.
In a nutshell: The Qiu Dongrong era left behind a defensive methodology, but the person was gone. The Lu Bin era won an offensive battle but failed to establish a stronghold. Between these two stages, a structural fault line appeared in the investment research system.
The Current Situation: The Veteran Returns, Lv Zhanjia Arrives, With Limited Effect
The current General Manager, Li Xuanjin, is a true veteran—he came to help establish HSBC Jintrust in 2004, served as its first General Manager, was transferred to Taiwan in 2012, and was invited back for a "second term" at the end of 2021. His task is clear: pull the company out of its "Lu Bin dependency," rebuild the platform, expand fixed income, and broaden the product line.
In September 2023, the company poached fixed-income veteran Lv Zhanjia from Bank of Communications Wealth Management (appointed as Deputy General Manager, overseeing fixed income). His resume is solid, and his system aligns—emphasizing credit bottom lines and a wealth management subsidiary approach of scrutinizing every basis point.
But after two and a half years, the scale of bond funds remains less than 11 billion yuan, with money market funds adding another 30 billion yuan to prop up the numbers. The root cause remains the same: HSBC Jintrust's sales foundation and channel DNA cannot support large-scale fixed-income expansion. Without the natural capital infusion from a bank shareholder, the foreign brand effect works more on high-end retail and mutual recognition funds, making it difficult to accumulate significant bond fund scale.
The difficulty for HSBC Jintrust is that of a company that once had a clear investment soul. After that soul departed, it patched the hole with a star successor and sector bets but ultimately failed to rebuild a platform-based investment research production chain.
The HSBC Jintrust of the Qiu Dongrong era was convincing because when you bought its products, you weren't buying someone's luck, but a disciplined promise of "low valuation + risk pricing."
Today's HSBC Jintrust still has the slogans, and the framework remains on PowerPoint slides. But the question the market is asking—"Can your system still stably produce Alpha, or are we just waiting for the next Lu Bin to emerge on his own?"—no one can answer clearly and decisively.
The veteran has returned, and the cards have been reshuffled. But the hand he's been dealt is indeed a tough one to play.
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