The CEO of Hong Kong hedge fund management firm Value Partners Group, Mr Cheah Cheng Hye, delivered a keynote speech in New York late last week, entitled Value Investing: Making it Work in China and Asia. Cheah was speaking at the prestigious 20^th Annual Graham & Dodd Breakfast Seminar where over 400 guests from the worlds of investment finance and academia were in attendance. Columbia University’s business school co-hosted the event. This year has been especially fruitful for Value Partners, whose USD5.7 billion hedge fund saw them officially recognized as Asia Pacific’s number one fund (with respect to AUM) following a survey by Institutional Investor, knocking Tokyo-based SPARX Group into second place. Unsurprisingly, Cheah’s speech was well received at what is generally regarded to be one of the key events in the world of value investing. Cheah began by talking about how his firm had become “a temple of value investing in Asia”, shedding light on how his team had been developing their value investing process whilst adapting to both China’s and Asia’s economic and investment environments. Character and discipline within the team were, in Cheah’s opinion, one of the key factors to the firm’s success, saying that his team was “trained to tame the forces of overconfidence, ensuring that they neither overreact nor under-react, and that they maintain a contrarian approach to investing”. He ended the presentation with the firm’s motto: “Small enough to be effective, but big enough to be strong.”