For John Ho’s Hong Kong-based Janchor Partners Pan Asian Fund, things continue to go from strength to strength.
For John Ho’s Hong Kong-based Janchor Partners Pan Asian Fund, things continue to go from strength to strength. Ho, former Asia head of The Children’s Investment Fund, has seen assets steadily flow into the fund since it launched last January, expanding from an initial capital base of USD40million to an estimated USD500million. Having returned an estimated 35.5 per cent in 2010, the fund’s assets have grown to such an extent that any future capital raising will be carefully considered. “Because our business model doesn’t allow us to get more fees, we want to know every dollar we have makes returns,” Ho (pictured) told Bloomberg in an interview this week.
The fund itself employs an original structure in that fee discounts are offered to investors willing to commit capital for longer-than-average periods, management fees are waived when AUM reaches USD500million (which it’s now hit) and some of the fund’s performance fees are partially refunded should it make an annual loss.
To that end, the average capital lock-up is 2.5 years, with Ho confirming that 70 per cent of the fund’s assets are committed for three years (charging management fees of 1.6 per cent). Ho told Bloomberg that the firm already had a “significant backlog” of capital that it could accept in the near-term. The fund uses an equity l/s strategy, easily outperforming the region’s average return of 7.3 per cent, with Ho confirming that his largest 25 stock positions accounted for 90 per cent of total investments. Three quarters of the fund’s returns came from going long (appreciating 48 per cent), with the other quarter coming from selling short positions (down 29 per cent). Gaming companies in Singapore and Macao as well as Chinese infrastructure companies were the fund’s key targets.
