disappeared for 199 days, and Cai Songsong, the "top stream" of the fund, had an accident

From the end of 2020 with a fund management scale of 40 billion yuan to the rumored sentence in April 2024, Cai Songsong, a student from a prestigious school, has had great ups and downs in less than three and a half years. When fund managers actively or passively become celebrities and Internet celebrities, this becomes fate.

01, Cai Songsong, who "disappeared".

Where did Cai Songsong go?

Since September 29 last year, Nuoan Fund announced on its official website that star fund manager Cai Songsong has been separated from all the fund products under management and the reason for leaving is "personal reasons", the entire fund circle is speculating: Which private equity will he join?

Now the news is that Cai Songsong has a lawsuit. Tianyancha A court announcement shows that the appellees Cai Songsong, Qu Quanru, Dong Boxiong and others are involved in the "crime of accepting bribes by non-state functionaries and offering bribes to non-state functionaries", and the trial has been held in the Jinhua Intermediate People's Court on March 27 this year, with the case number (2024) Zhe 07 Xingchu No. 1.

▲ (Source/Tianyancha)

After the relevant news was released, the topic of "Cai Songsong, a former fund manager of Sino Analytica, was involved in bribery", immediately appeared on Weibo hot search, and there were rumors that he "has been sentenced".

In response to the news that "he has been sentenced" on the Internet, Cai Songsong himself responded to the "Shanghai Securities News": "I have nothing to say, this is what I said on the Internet." ”

Wang Jiaye, a lawyer at Hiways Law Firm, told City Boundary that if the rumored verdict is true, it means that Cai Songsong's actual crime is relatively minor, he has shown corresponding remorse, and the possibility of subsequent harm to society is small. "Because if the circumstances of the crime are serious, it may be a real sentence rather than a suspended sentence as reported on the Internet. From this point of view, it can be inferred that Cai Songsong himself may have less subjective malice, and the objective negative impact or harmful results are not very bad, so there is room for probation. ”

As a star fund manager who once managed tens of billions of assets, Cai Songsong's involvement in the case has attracted the attention of the whole network, especially in the Intermediate People's Court in the first instance. Wang Jiaye told "City Boundary" that in criminal cases, except for dangerous cases, usually only cases that may be sentenced to life imprisonment or the death penalty will be filed by the intermediate court. It can be seen that the amount involved in Cai Songsong's case will not be too low. Of course, it is not yet possible for the outside world to know the specific amount involved.

Lawyer Wang Jiaye also emphasized that although it can be inferred from the current public result information, Cai Songsong himself was finally given a suspended sentence, and the circumstances were relatively minor. However, in accordance with the current laws and regulatory provisions, Cai Songsong may be subject to administrative penalties such as market bans or prohibitions from holding senior management positions such as the actual controller and legal representative of the fund company.

In response to this online information, the city had called Cai Songsong's phone, but it was connected but no one answered.

When an industry insider saw the relevant news on the Internet, he commented: A student bully has been ruined.

Cai Songsong is indeed a student bully. He was admitted to the junior class of the University of Science and Technology of China at the age of 15, and later studied for a master's and doctoral degree at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and graduated at the age of 25 with a doctorate. Therefore, when he was in the Nuoan Fund, Cai Songsong also had the title of "Cai Bo".

From September 29, 2023, when the official announced his departure from Nuoan Fund, to April 15, 2024, Cai Songsong "disappeared" for 199 days. In these 199 days, what happened is really as Cai Songsong said softly, "Is there nothing to say?"

02, "Stud" past

I saw him raise a tall building, I watched him feast guests, and I saw his building collapse.

Since May last year, Cai Songsong began to gradually get out of the fund products under management, and by the end of September, the "clearance" was completed.

Indeed, as one of the technology fund managers with the highest attention in recent years, in February 2019, he was a "fledgling" and became famous when he took over Sino Analytica Growth Mix, leading Sino Analytica Growth Mix to achieve an annual performance of 95.44% with his heavy position in the semiconductor sector, ranking 4/413 in similar products. In the following two years, the product also brought huge profits to investors with annual returns of 39.10% and 22.50%.

At the same time, Cai Songsong also took advantage of the trend to join the 40 billion fund manager "club". You must know that in 2018, the scale of Sino Analytica's growth mix was only 380 million yuan. After Cai Songsong took over in 2019, the product quickly grew to 6.6 billion yuan, and then reached 32.7 billion yuan in 2020, and his own management scale exceeded 40 billion yuan at its peak.

Until 2022, fluctuations in the semiconductor industry had an impact on the performance of Sino Analytica's growth mix. In particular, Cai Songsong prefers "stud single track style", and the share price of Zhuosheng Micro, which is heavily positioned, has fallen by nearly 7% in the first three quarters of 2022, which has directly dragged down the net value performance of Sino Analytica.

At the end of 2022, the fund had a return of -40.04%, ranking 2,581 out of 2,610 products in the same category. As of the end of September 2023, Cai Songsong stepped down, and the annual return of Sino Growth Mixed Fund was -3.15%, which was better than the average performance of similar partial equity hybrid funds of -13.52%.

▲ (Cai Songsong manages product performance.) Source/Choice data)

Although the management scale of more than 40 billion yuan is not small, Cai Songsong is not out of the circle because of this, after all, in 2020, there are 51 fund managers in the whole market with a management scale of more than 40 billion. What made him "break the circle" in the real sense was the Internet hot stalk of "making money is called Mr. Cai, and losing money is called Cai Gou", and the "Cai Dog" around the popular fund circle.

▲ (Image source/a shopping software)

At that time, Cai Songsong responded generously in an interview with "People", he knew about this peripheral: "There are friends around who still buy it, and I came to ask if I could buy it before I bought it." Cai Songsong said: This is a natural phenomenon after the market pays attention to you and the nationalization of the fund.

Since then, Cai Songsong has become a "star fund manager" in the real sense, and his own understanding of this phenomenon is quite rational: the premise of fund manager stardom or Internet celebrity is that "the entire market has relative returns, or even excess returns." These star products and star fund managers were born on this basic traffic. If the market all falls at once, all of them are at the bottom, and whoever buys loses money, you see that there is no one to talk about it. ”

In a word, it is a prophecy. As the market enters a period of deep adjustment in 2022, Cai Songsong is also as he predicted before, in addition to being mentioned several times because of the "70 million sky-high salary", if there is no rumor of "sentenced" this time, the market may have forgotten Cai Songsong's story.

When fund managers actively or passively become celebrities and Internet celebrities, big ups and downs become a kind of fate.

（作者 | 路春峰，编辑 | 韩忠强）