MARVELSTONE, which moved its headquarters from Hong Kong to Singapore this year, is behind the not-for-profit fintech hub Lattice80.
With just a laptop, two spare shirts and S$500 (Bt12,500) in his pocket, young South Korean Joe Cho packed his bags and headed to Singapore 12 years ago.
He quickly fell in love with the nation and a Singapore girl he later married. Together they are on their way to building a financial empire.
The 38-year-old chairman of private investment group Marvelstone Group came to Singapore to join an Israeli start-up, whose chief executive liked how he had lived all over the world, recalls Cho. This included 2.5 years in Nepal where he volunteered on a Nepalese and Korean government project.
“He thought I was quite creative and I came here for a three-month project and met my wife and business partner, Gina,” he says.
Marvelstone, which moved its headquarters from Hong Kong to Singapore this year, is also behind the not-for-profit fintech hub Lattice80 at 80 Robinson Road, which opened on November 10.
After that start-up stint, Cho did mostly programming-related projects for a year before setting up his asset management firm Leonie Hill Capital with Gina Heng – now Marvelstone’s chief executive – with $50,000 of their savings as working capital.
Cho was inspired by a TED talk – a popular series of online talks on a wide range of topics – featuring Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, to start his own business.
“They asked how happy you were when you wake up every morning and if you were excited about it. Programming had been my passion all this while but I found stock trading more interesting and thought I’d be happy doing it for a long time.
“I quit my job the next day, without even having money for the next month’s rent. I was talking to Gina, who was a banking analyst, and we had the same vision and we registered Leonie Hill Capital one day in 2007. Leonie Hill because we were living there,” he said with a laugh.
The computer science and finance graduate, who has been programming since he was five years old, became interested in trading while studying at Handong Global University.
“Luckily I started programming early. I tried creating strategies and an automated trading platform, so my quant fund strategies started in university.” Quant funds use strategies based on computer models.
At Leonie Hill, he was working 15 to 20 hours every day, seven days a week for five to six years, delivering high double-digit returns every year. But the firm took two to three years to raise its first million.
“As a business we failed, we made a lot of money for investors but not the firm. I was helping small investors, and because I liked trading, I was almost doing it for free.
“We found out many people wanted to buy the business, but exited it instead of selling. My dream at Leonie Hill was to manage $1 billion, be in Bloomberg magazine and be a popular hedge fund but somehow it didn’t work out.” So the couple and Joel Ko, a South Korean living here – now Marvelstone’s managing partner – came together with the lofty ambition of overtaking BlackRock, the largest institutional investor with $4.7 trillion of assets under management.
The trio started One Asia Investment Partners in 2012, pooling “all the money we had”.
The first move was to acquire an asset management company in South Korea managing $2 billion of assets for $20 million.
The plan was to find maybe 20 of such partners, as “we reverse engineered the process to make $8 trillion in 15 years, as BlackRock took 30 years to reach $4 trillion”, he says.
However, the South Korean deal fell through after two years, and the trio left the firm, starting anew using Marvelstone, which was initially set up in 2010 in Hong Kong by Cho to do commodities trading.
They closed Marvelstone’s operations in South Korea and Indonesia and applied for a financial licence to set up shop in Singapore this year, moving all operations here because they saw how the fintech scene was growing.