One year may be brief in the long river of the capital market, but for the public fund industry, the period from May 7, 2025 to May 7, 2026 is a crucial stage of profound transformation from breakthrough to significant effectiveness. With the Action Plan for Promoting High Quality Development of Public Funds (hereinafter referred to as the "Action Plan") as the guiding principle, the industry has bid farewell to the path dependence of "scale first" in the past and embarked on a systematic reform centered on "investors". Looking back on this year, the author believes that the reform did not stay in policy documents, but rather took root and demonstrated its effectiveness in adjusting the fee structure, anchoring performance comparison benchmarks, and shifting assessment mechanisms. This high scoring answer sheet with the theme of "return orientation" has become a vivid footnote to the continuous high-quality development of public funds. The Action Plan will prioritize the establishment of a floating management fee collection mechanism linked to fund performance. The launch of the first batch of 26 new model floating management fee rate funds marks a shift from institutional design to product practice in the reform. The management fee rate adopts an asymmetric design of "benchmark level+up/down level", where the downshifting allows the profitability to far exceed the upshifting range, and the institutional balance is clearly tilted towards investors. As of May 7, 2026, nearly 90% of the first batch of products have achieved positive returns, and the feasibility of the mechanism design has been preliminarily verified. At the same time, with the implementation of new regulations on sales fees, the "three-step" reform of public fund fees has come to a comprehensive end. By offering discounts on management fees, transaction commissions, and sales expenses, the total annual cost savings for investors exceed 50 billion yuan, and the overall industry comprehensive fee rate has decreased by about 20%. This is not simply a reduction in fees, but a fundamental restructuring of the industry's profit model - shifting from fixed fees based on "drought and flood guarantee" to a binding model of "performance for reward", with a closer relationship between the interests of public institutions and investors. For a long time, "style drift" and "mismatch between name and reality" have been stubborn problems in the public fund industry, seriously affecting investor trust and market order. The key move of the reform is to elevate the performance benchmark from formal terms to institutional constraints. In March 2026, the new regulations on performance comparison benchmarks for public funds will be officially implemented. Benchmarks are no longer just decorations for product promotion, but rather anchors for investment management. Fund companies must establish a full process mechanism covering benchmark selection, operational monitoring, deviation correction, etc. Once the benchmark is selected, it cannot be changed arbitrarily. Subsequently, 12 public offering institutions concentrated on adjusting the performance benchmark of nearly 200 products. This is not a simple technical correction, but a reshaping of industry investment discipline. When "benchmarking and adhering to positioning" becomes a rigid requirement, investors have a clear standard for evaluating funds, and industry transparency and standardization are substantially improved. The chain of institutional design ultimately needs to fall into regulating institutional behavior and guiding long-term investment. The revision of the "Guidelines for Performance Appraisal Management of Fund Management Companies" provides a hard answer: the weight of long-term performance indicators for more than 3 years should not be less than 80%, and shareholder dividends should be closely linked to the long-term performance of the fund and the depth of profit and loss held by investors. This requirement fundamentally reverses the short-term trend, as fund managers do not need to frequently adjust their positions for quarterly rankings, and fund companies do not need to chase short-term gains or losses. From the perspective of industry practice, the logic of investment research has undergone profound changes, and the short-term game space continues to shrink. Deepening the long-term value of the industry and strictly controlling style drift have become the unanimous choice of mainstream institutions. The core goals of the reform are ultimately reflected in two "service" capabilities: serving residents' wealth management and serving the real economy. Data shows that from early 2025 to the end of March 2026, the market value of stocks invested by public funds in the manufacturing and science and technology innovation industries will increase from 4.3 trillion yuan to over 6 trillion yuan, an increase of nearly 40%; The total profit of public funds is 2.4 trillion yuan, including 1.8 trillion yuan of equity funds. As of the end of February 2026, the total management scale of public funds has exceeded 38.6 trillion yuan for the first time in history. The above data indicates that a virtuous cycle is forming: equity funds continue to expand to provide capital support for technological innovation, and the growth of technological innovation enterprises in turn feeds back into fund investment returns. The strategic function of public funds as a key pivot in the "technology industry finance" cycle is becoming increasingly prominent. The one-year reform has achieved significant results, but some of the long-standing problems in the public fund industry are difficult to completely eliminate in the short term. The inertia of some institutions that prioritize scale over returns has not been completely eliminated, and there is still room for optimization in the matching of investment research capabilities with residents' wealth needs, standardized sales behavior, and long-term investor companionship system. As proposed in the Action Plan, we will strive to solidly promote the implementation and effectiveness of various policy measures within about three years, and form a "turning point" for the high-quality development of the industry. In the future, with the continuous improvement of institutional frameworks, deepening of institutional transformation, and increasingly mature market concepts, public funds are expected to play a more solid role as "ballast stones" and "boosters" in safeguarding residents' investment confidence, serving the capital market and the real economy. (Looking into the New Era)