Former CIC stock picker Yu Bin plans China fund, sources say

Yu Bin, a former managing director at China's sovereign wealth fund, plans to start a fund focused on China equities, sources said.

Yu resigned from Beijing-based China Investment Corp (CIC) earlier this year for personal reasons, they said. He will remain based in China and his long-biased fund will primarily bet on stocks whose prices are expected to rise, they said.

Institutional investors globally have been scouting for China-based managers with international experience, who can pick stocks set to benefit from growth in the world's second-largest economy and do not charge hedge-fund fees that are typically higher.

The Columbia, Harvard and Princeton university endowments, and the Ford Foundation are among those that now have their own quotas to invest in yuan-denominated stocks traded on China's exchanges.

Yu was a managing director of public equities at CIC, running its direct stock investments, said the sources. That department also allocates money to outside long-only stock funds, they added.

CIC, which was set up to help boost returns on the mainland's foreign-currency reserves, oversaw about US$650 billion of assets at the end of last year, Sina Corp reported on its website in February, citing the fund chairman Ding Xuedong. The market value of its overseas investments exceeded US$200 billion, the report said.