BEIJING, Aug. 4 (Xinhua) -- Sixty percent of Chinese stock investors say the maximum losses they could bear from stock investment is 20 percent of the capital invested and would pursue rational investment, according to a latest survey.

But more than half of the individual investors say they would hold stocks no longer than three month and hope to achieve high yields in short term.

The average days individual investors have held a stock in hand is only 116 days, according to the survey jointly conducted by the Securities Association of China and the China Securities Investors Protection Fund Corporation.

The survey covering 3,001 individual and institutional investors in 17 cities including Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou shows nearly seventy percent of individual investors have channeled no more than half a million yuan into stock markets, with one-quarter investing less than 100,000 yuan.

Another seventy percent have kept one-third of their family financial assets in stocks, with 13.4 percent channeling all of their family financial assets into stock markets.

More than 10 percent of individuals who entered the stock markets since 2006 have borrowed to invest. The proportion is 8.3 percent among stock investors who entered the market earlier.

Fifty-four percent of individual investors say they would not add more investment into stock markets this year, with only 17 percent considering investing more. A lion's share of the polled look forward to a yield of 10 percent to 50 percent.

Laid-off workers, retired people and the self-employed take up the highest proportion of 35.5 percent of the polled, followed by 31.1 percent for company employees and professional and technical personnel.

The survey shows sixty percent of the individual investors have received college education or obtained higher academic degrees. Seventy percent of them earn a monthly income of less than 5,000 yuan.

Individual and institutional investors share a common concern over the practice of fund managers and advocate innovation in financial product development. Sixty percent of them think local stock markets will keep bullish before the 2008 Beijing Olympics, said the survey.

Stipulated by the shareholder reforms to float nontradable state-owned shares and the return of red chips from Hong Kong stock exchange markets, the stock markets of the Chinese mainland have pulled out of a lull since the latter half of last year and surged to new highs three times this week.

On Friday, the benchmark Shanghai Composite Index soared 153.04 points, or 3.47 percent, to close at 4,560.77 points on a daily transaction volume of 175.9 billion yuan while the Component Index on the smaller Shenzhen Stock Exchange rose 617.50 points, or 3.97 percent, to conclude the trading at 16,179.64 points on a turnover of 95 billion yuan.