China’s young investors embrace risk. Why are their portfolios so safe?

Young Chinese investors may be just as willing to take risks as their global peers, but their portfolios remain more conservative against a backdrop of years of relative underperformance in China’s stock market, a prolonged property downturn and deflation, according to a senior researcher at the CFA Institute Research and Policy Centre.

The disconnect between their willingness to take risks and their actual investment choices illustrated what the institute called an “aspiration-implementation...