Oscar de la Renta chose not to show at New York Fashion Week and instead streamed on Amazon. Is Amazon a suitable forum for a luxury brand? CEO Alex Bolen said, "I'm not sure. But we have to experiment with new ways to get our story out." https://lnkd.in/g4rZMxyb We launched our funds when Covid started and with the halt in travel and tough fund raising environment for emerging managers, we focused on performance and experimented with new ways to reach out to allocators, namely Linkedin posts and YouTube videos which can now be binge-watched on www.quantflix.com . True, some people say that with the positive fund returns last year for both our long-only equity and multi-strategy funds, and the China fund outperforming its benchmark by its annualized double-digit aim, it was expected that we would pass the $100m mark. But when times are bad, most new investment monies went to well-known funds that are much bigger with a marketing budget that we cannot afford. So every lit...
Specialization made sense when textile technology was bad and the dye came off easily. That was also before the invention of detergent to keep colors on. The most significant change is that there is now a smaller number of people in each household, sometimes just one, which makes filling a whole load with just white clothes challenging. And it's not ESG to run the washing machine with just one white T-shirt - see illustrated example in attached photo.
Investing in ASEAN is like having white shirts. It fell out of favor with Asian funds because everyone wanted red clothes. MSCI Asia Pacific ex Japan came to be dominated by Chinese tech companies. Allocators in the West wanted to participate in China's rise of the middle class population, and it became easier for funds to raise capital by being China-focused.
Now with the turbulence and uncertainty of Chinese companies, and with us as one of the few remaining shops in town with experience investing in the region, we are asked if we can provide an ASEAN only version of our fund, even though our Asia long equities fund is up this year. Some allocators even ask if we can be country specific, say Indonesia or Vietnam only. That would be like just offering Plain White T's - super popular for a while, always will have a following, but most of the time not enough fans to fill a whole concert hall.
ASEAN is growing but it is not a big enough economy on its own like the US or even China. If you are a washing machine that can only wash white clothes then you will somehow have a full load of white clothes. Maybe there is a shirt you only wore for a few hours, maybe there is a towel but at least it's white. The objective is to have clean clothes to wear but you might extend the washing frequency from once a week to once every two weeks so you don't incur too much transaction costs per wash, which results in stinky clothes sitting in the laundry basket. At the end of the day, we just want the fund to make money while smelling like roses (or lemon or seabreeze).
Washing white clothes separately might get you the whitest white shirt. But you don't want to stick out when the environment has changed to a nightclub with blacklight.
#investing #asean #hedgefunds #laundry
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