1. When did you start your hedge fund and how many people are involved?

We first established an investment firm in May 2002 with two directors, the CEO and myself with 3,000,000 paid-in capital with an intention to evolve into a hedge fund in the future. The CEO worked for Sanyo, Ark and Dongsuh Securities as well as Saison insurance. I have worked for Merrill Lynch, Barclays, Dongsuh, Citigroup and Nikko Securities. The initial activities included investment consulting, development of new investment/trading tools and proprietary trading. In April 2003, we added a third director, formerly a fund manager at one of the largest investment trust & management companies. He joined us to bring in his expertise at fund management and his programming capability to develop equity long/short strategies. We got lucky with another personal contact, and are now sharing office space with another investment firm in central Tokyo. That really helped to save set up costs.

2. How did you know each other and begin a start up in Tokyo?
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Yoichi Umeki was born and raised in Japan, has studied in Canada, and has worked in New York, Toronto, London and Tokyo. His professional career covers more than 15 years in the derivatives industry, including trading, structuring and sales of FI, FX, Commodity products and Derivatives. Since 1997, he had been the risk manager for Lehman Brothers in Tokyo with market risk management responsibility in all of Asian Fixed Income products. His risk management experiences include analysis of counter party credit risks and dealing with the regulatory issues globally. Recent consulting work includes setting up the risk management
infrastructure for a global (more…)

John Honeyman is responsible for sales of the electronic trading services of CAI Securities in Japan, covering Asian cash equities and equity derivatives, as well as sales of the execution services of CAI’s regional dealing desks handling discretionary client trading for Asia. Prior to joining CAI, John worked for several years in one of the prominent vendors of order management systems, and was responsible for helping penetrate domestic Japanese sell-side accounts. His background is concentrated on technology sales and software project management. He is originally from Chicago, and has lived (more…)

It is not news to anyone that for the last few years the Japanese investment environment has been extremely difficult to say the least. The opportunities for making traditional money in Japan have been next to nothing and the concurrent downturn in the global markets since late 2000 has only exacerbated the problems facing mainstream Japanese investors. The lack of absolute returns is a problem facing both retail and institutional investors across the board in Japan.

The institutional investors, especially pension funds are starting to reach a critical point in their conservative history. As we are now approaching (more…)