Beijing Stock Exchange. Photo: CFP

A total of eight public equity funds investing in stocks listed on the Beijing Stock Exchange (BSE), a bourse dedicated to addressing fundraising woes for small- and medium-sized Chinese enterprises which opened trading on Monday, have been fully subscribed within three hours after their launch on Friday morning, the Global Times learned.

Their rapid sale is a reflection of investors' bullish market sentiment, analysts said, and the issuance of more similar BSE-themed equity funds is expected to inject long-term liquidity into the capital market.  

The eight public equity funds were issued by eight big-name Chinese fund companies including EFund, GF Fund Management and China Asset Management, with a maximum fund cap of 500 million yuan ($78.35 million) each. They are all managed by star fund managers. 

The Global Times learned from BSE that all the funds, with a total scale of 4 billion yuan, were subscribed to the upper limit as of the closing of Friday's morning session. Some industry insiders estimated that the placement ratio is around 50 percent on average.

According to those abovementioned funds' subscription prospectus, the percentage of investment in BSE companies shall not be lower than 80 percent of the funds' non-cash fund assets, and the first closed period lasts for two years, during which investors are allowed to redeem their investments. 

Currently, the first batch of 81 companies debuted on the bourse on Monday, including 10 of which were newly approved and 71 transferred from the selected tier of China's National Equities Exchange and Quotations. About 100 shares are expected to trade on the new market by the year's end.

The turnover of the 81 firms hit 16.99 billion yuan in the first three days of opening, per data from the exchange. The newly listed 10 firms surged 146.8 percent on average by Wednesday's close.

A total of 295,000 investors opened new accounts in the first three days of trading. Qualified investors amounted to 4.32 million across the market, per data from the exchange.

Global Times