Incremental funds continue to flow in! New A-share account openings in the first quarter increased by over 60% year-on-year.

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Recently, trading activity in China’s A-share market has remained strong, and investors’ enthusiasm for entering the market has been high. The latest data from the Shanghai Stock Exchange shows that in March this year, the number of new accounts for A-shares in Shanghai exceeded 4.6014 million, up 82.38% month-over-month and 50.10% year-over-year. In the first quarter, the cumulative number of new accounts for Shanghai A-shares reached 12.0402 million, up 61.15% year-over-year.

Since January, new A-share accounts in Shanghai have shown a trend of “opening high, pulling back, and then surging again.” In January, the number of accounts reached 4.9158 million. In February, due to fewer trading days caused by the Spring Festival holiday, it fell to 2.52M. In March, it rebounded sharply to 4.6014 million. From the structure of new accounts in March, individual investors opened 4.5882 million accounts and institutions opened 13.2k accounts; individual investors remain the main force. In addition, in March, Shanghai B-shares had 1.2k new accounts, while funds opened 394k new accounts.

What is worth paying attention to is that the number of new accounts in January this year ranked only below 6.85 million in October 2024, the second-highest in the past year; and the account volume in March also surpassed the single-month data of any month in 2025, showing that the market’s appeal is continuing to increase.

At the beginning of March, the Shanghai Composite Index briefly broke through the earlier phase high, and then showed a choppy, sideways trend, with a full-month cumulative decline of 6.5%. Although the broad market index performed relatively weakly, structural opportunities kept emerging, with sectors such as power, pharmaceuticals, computing power, and chemical industries rotating up and strengthening.

In the first quarter, all three major A-share indexes closed lower together, but their declines were clearly smaller than those of major overseas indexes such as the US stock market, reflecting stronger market resilience. Among them, the SSE Composite Index fell 1.94%, the Shenzhen Component Index fell 0.35%, and the ChiNext Index fell 0.57%.

Looking at specifics, the oil and petrochemicals and coal industry sectors led by a wide margin, with gains of 18.27% and 17.64%, respectively. Utilities, building materials, and electrical equipment delivered impressive gains, rising 8.78%, 8.26%, and 6.02%, respectively. Consumer and financial real estate sectors led the declines: discretionary consumer retail fell 14.90%, and non-bank financials dropped 14.84%.

So, with the conflict between the US and Iran still unresolved, how will the A-share market unfold in the future—and how should investors position themselves?

“In the near term, the market is expected to return to above the 4000-point level. Once external shocks lessen, more proactive and capable domestic macro policies will gradually take effect, and the central bank will implement moderately accommodative monetary policy. This means the market will get back to its prior rhythm and continue to produce a slow bull/long bull market trend.” Yang Delong, Chief Economist at Qianhai Open-Source Fund, told the reporter from Jiemian News.

He said that the current market is still in the mid-stage of a bull market, with the price-to-earnings ratio of the CSI 300 only around 14 times, which is below the historical average valuation. In terms of both time and space, this round of slow bull/long bull market is still in the first half. Everyone should maintain confidence and patience, and actively follow some high-quality stocks or high-quality funds that have been mistreated by the market, in order to seize the next opportunity for the market to push higher.

On specific investment directions, he recommended that this year adopt a “new dumbbell strategy”: one end of the “dumbbell” is tech-leading stocks representing technology innovation, especially those highlighted in the “15th Five-Year Plan” key points, such as robotics, chip semiconductors, computing-power algorithms, commercial aerospace, solid-state batteries, controllable nuclear fusion, and more; the other end of the “dumbbell” is traditional blue-chip stocks with heavy assets and low volatility—namely “HALO assets,” such as power grid equipment, non-ferrous metals, coal, oil and gas, and other resources and energy fields—these remain key directions for market focus.

Kuang Zheng, Chief Investment Director for private banking and wealth management China at HSBC, told the reporter from Jiemian News that China is in a leading position in artificial intelligence competition, and the outline of the “15th Five-Year Plan” places even more emphasis on the idea that innovation is an important driving force for high-quality development. He is bullish on Chinese stocks and, through the “barbell strategy,” focuses on innovation-leading companies and high-quality, high-yield stocks. On the one hand, this is intended to capture China’s opportunities for structural growth; on the other hand, it can provide support for an investment portfolio through stable dividend income.

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