CHEAH CHENG HYE, 'Warren Buffett of the East'

December 21, 2009
CHEAH CHENG HYE, 'Warren Buffett of the East'

• “We are far from infallible. I’ve done a study of our decision-making process going back to 1993 and found that one third of the time, we made mistakes. One third were good moves and one third were neutral.”

• But in equity investing, it is stellar performance if you make lots of money on the decisions that turned out fine and lost not too much on those that went sour.

• In terms of client categories, about 82 per cent of all the assets under management came from institutions such as insurance companies, banks and conglomerates.

• The sparkling performance numbers: Value Partners has delivered a 16 per cent per annum compounded gain to its clients since 1993 when it was founded.

• In the last 10 years, including the disastrous 2008, the gain was 20.3 per cent a year compounded.

• On a yearly basis, Value Partners Classic Fund has made money in 12 out of the last 16 years of its existence.

• Last year was one of those four terrible years. The fund lost 47.9 per cent net – and that’s after selling down some stocks ahead of the crisis turning full blown.

• Last year aside, why is that intense analysis of reams of financial statements, lots of visits to companies and interviews with management can still lead an investor like Value Partners to make wrong conclusions about some stocks?

• In Mr Cheah’s words: corporate governance.  “If you isolate the mistakes of Value Partners, the single largest reason we find is our poor judgment of management’s integrity and quality. We thought the guy was honest but he turned out to be a crook.”

• He agreed to a suggestion that there’s randomness in the market, adding: “Yes, and the bad guys also come up with new ways to fool you!”

• The corporate governance challenge is not absent but is far less pressing when it comes to investing in China companies listed in Hong Kong. “It is a well regulated market. People have learnt the hard way that it makes no sense to ‘play a fool’ with Hong Kong regulators, as they will come down hard on you,” said Mr Cheah.

• “The average investor should only put a proportion of his money into equities. I believe that the potential risk-versus-opportunity situation today does not encourage an all-equity approach,” said Mr Cheah.

• “For myself, I would want to have a spread of money in cash, tangible assets like gold, and equities spread across different classes and geographic regions. No one can predict with any certainty what the world will be like two to three years from now.”

• I believe it should be in China-related stocks. I look at the map of the world and I’m unable to find any other major equity market that excites me or fills me with hope. This is a market I know very well: I have devoted 20 years of my life to it.”

• And among the important things that he is sure of, it is that the renminbi is going to resume its rise.

• In the longer-term, China has to reinvent is economy from being export-dependent to being underpinned by domestic demand. The country’s policy direction is pushing China banks to lend out more money, which could sow the seeds of bad loans in two or three years from now, according to Mr Cheah.

• “In the last couple of years, we have done about 2,000 company visits a year – excluding phone calls. We have done this in good and bad times. We have 18 full-time professionals, whose average age is in the early 30s. As far as I know, we do more company visits than any China team in the world.”

• Value Partners deems itself to be a value investor seeking stocks with low price-earnings ratios and high dividend yields of at least five per cent. Whichever industry it finds such stocks, it will buy them.

• “We don’t limit our stock picks to any industry. Our job is to buy the 3Rs – the right business run by the right people and selling at the right price. At the moment we are finding the 3Rs in a broad spectrum of businesses across China.”

• “As a former journalist, I had an advantage over people who were purely financial people. I learnt to put events in a historical, political and social context. Many people with CFAs or MBAs are narrow in that they tend to interpret reality through quantitative and statistical analysis.”

• If there’s one area he hasn’t quite succeeded in, it’s learning Mandarin. “My Mandarin is no good. I have a vocabulary of probably only 2,000 words. I took tuition but have seldom stayed more four or six months in any particular class before dropping out.

• For his part, Mr Cheah said that unlike most people who sought to make as much money as possible, he “had always come from the opposite angle - that you must be passionate about what you do and be very good in it. The money will come naturally.”

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