Where’s the best place to run hedge funds that focus on Japan and China? Not Tokyo or Shanghai, it seems. Low Jeng-tek, who’s heading a new Asian venture for Miami-based alternative-investment firm Everest Capital, contends that it’s his hometown, Singapore.
Low explains that by keeping its distance, Everest can prevent the “noise” of local markets from interfering with objective decision making. More important, Singapore understands hedge funds better than do its Asian counterparts. “When you come from a foreign land and describe what a hedge fund is, 99 percent of the people in this region don’t know what you are talking about,” says Low. “The reception here was much more positive, and the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s financial center development department does a great job.”
Low, 36, worked in Singapore as a banker for DBS Holdings for a couple of years in the early 1990s after earning a business degree at the National University of Singapore. Then he ran his family’s furniture business for eight years, quintupling sales. After that he enrolled at Insead, taking classes at the famed school’s Paris and Singapore campuses and earning his MBA in December 2002. He joined $1.1 billion-in-assets Everest late last year after having been the firm’s eyes and ears in Singapore since early 2003.
For Everest, the lure of a Singapore office (apart, perhaps, from being able to get a discount on furnishings from Low’s family business) is the chance to get closer to a region in which the firm has been investing since 1990. Everest’s three new Asia funds -- China Opportunity, Japan Opportunity and Japan Long-Short Opportunity -- have gathered $160 million in assets since January 2002.
Low doesn’t worry that his team of two investment managers, two analysts and a trader will suffer from being so far removed from Tokyo and Shanghai. He notes: “Where does Warren Buffett place himself? In Omaha, Nebraska.”
