Liang Wenfeng's High-Flyer Quant just had a brutal July. The private fund tracking platform Simuwang shows all nine of its publicly displayed products lost more than 20% of their net value in a single month. The biggest loser was High-Flyer CSI 500 Quantitative Aggressive No. 1, down 22.15%. As of July 31, only one product still held a year-to-date gain — a razor-thin 0.04% — while the other eight had fallen into the red.
This wasn't just a High-Flyer problem. Between July 13 and 17, the CSI 500 plunged roughly 11.7% in a single week, while the CSI 1000 and CSI 2000 each fell more than 12%. In the same stretch, all 10 of High-Flyer's quantitative long-only products lost more than 15% for the week. Rivals including Mingshi, Pingfanghe, Jiukun, and Minghong went through similar drawdowns.
The industry blames overcrowding in tech growth stocks and high-momentum strategies. When the market's style suddenly flipped, similar strategies rushed to rebalance at the same time, turning once-reliable profit factors into a shared source of losses. In the first half of this year, 1,236 index-enhanced products averaged just 3.11% excess returns, compared with 14.17% a year earlier.