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We are launching Friday Only Club!

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...
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Overcoming Fear and Defying Odds

I came back to the office after a particularly bad bout of flu which kept me from work for a whole week! It's like that commercial where the (annoying) Energizer Bunny starts slowing down then completely stops.

Apparently my flu bug transcends Man-Machine borders because one of the Bloomberg terminals stopped working this morning. After some troubleshooting, we concluded that it was most probably just the fan in the CPU that needs to be fixed. The junior staff sat around to discuss democratically how to best proceed:


"So we just bring it to Sim Lim to repair?" (Sim Lim is a mall with a high concentration of computer repair shops)
"Eh but even if it's just the fan I heard from friends that the repair guy will tell you it can't be fixed and you need to buy a new computer."
"End up might as well just order a new CPU."
"So don't bring to fix ah?"

Luckily our wise chief risk officer interrupted this negativity and declared, "Just bring to the shop and try. We can't give up before even giving a shot, and there are honest repair guys out there."

In the end the repair shop said there was nothing wrong with the CPU and we had simply accidentally turned off a switch.

Moral of the story: if we just think of all the things that could possibly go wrong, we'll be paralyzed with fear and do nothing.

I have two original Spider-Man film posters in the office. The first Spider-Man movie came out in 2002 which was the year I graduated from college. Naturally I had my fears at that time just about to start my first full-time job (with Sep 11 still fresh in my mind): What if my Japanese is not good enough for investment banking in Tokyo? What if someone finds out I can only speak anime Japanese? How would I survive knowing no one in the city? No friends, no classmates, no family. And what do I do about food - do I actually have to cook? Do they have laundromats in Japan?

If I succumbed to my fears I would have gone back to Singapore and most probably not be who I am today. As for the Spider-Man movie, despite all sorts of doubts and obstacles that caused production to be delayed for 25 years, it became the first movie to surpass $100m in a single weekend and is "credited for redefining the modern superhero genre, as well as the summer blockbuster".

P.S.: Everyone in the office found out about my anime Japanese in the first week, if not the first day. It's fine - people have no problem assigning you work.

#overcomingfear #spiderman #workinjapan #singapore #hedgefund #justdoit #globaleconomy



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We are launching Friday Only Club!

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...
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The First Edition of Friday Only Club!

  I got a latte art portrait of me today. It's not a "big deal" but shows the barista cares (at 9am in the morning). (No comments on how I look, especially my Bombastic Hair*, unless you look better with no Photoshop in your mid-40s with no makeup). Maybe some would say this is just business, the cafe is trying to get you to buy more coffee. But this is what differentiates a human barista from the Nespresso machine. Recently with year-end celebrations, New Year and Chinese New Year parties, I have been going to fancy wine dinners. I do appreciate the effort, and savings, but after talking to fellow investor friends I realized that sometimes we just need a cool place to chillax and share ideas (aka complain about investments that didn't work out). We can even bring our own wine. This coming Friday Only Club at Gao Cap Bar we'll have an expert talk (while drinking) about how to start an art collection, because a client asked me about displaying art in humid Singapor...
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