China's securities mutual funds made a combined net profit of 296 billion yuan ($43.34 billion) in the first quarter, reversing a string of quarterly losses since the end of 2007, an official newspaper reported on Wednesday.
Mutual funds and investors favored stocks over bonds in the latest period, according to summaries of the first-quarter earnings reports of 444 mutual funds run by 59 asset management companies.
China's benchmark stock index has jumped 39 percent so far this year, while bonds have marked a slight downtrend as the country's economy showed initial signs of recovery, reducing pressure for eased monetary policies.
During the quarter, China's equity-oriented funds increased their stock positions by nearly 9 percentage points from the end of last year, to 75.34 percent of total positions, the Shanghai Securities News said.
Investors redeemed 66 billion bond fund units in the first quarter, accounting for 38 percent of all their bond fund holdings, as they increasingly shifted to the rising stock market, the China Securities Journal said.
Banking and insurance stocks were the top picks of the funds in the first quarter, followed by machinery and equipment stocks, tables of fund holdings published in the newspapers showed.
The funds' five top picks in the quarter were Ping An Insurance (Group) Co of China, Pudong Development Bank, China Merchants Bank, CITIC Securities and Kweichow Moutai Co, the tables showed.
