A life-long learner who never stops learning, and puts knowledge to use
Cheah Cheng Hye’s rise from a former financial journalist to one of Asia’s prominent asset management pundits serves as a role model for those in his former profession aspiring for a stake in entrepreneurship.
He started off as a newspaper folder for the Malaysian newspaper The Star, where its editor later gave Cheah a reporter’s job, putting him on crime beat, which involved throwing him into the “not illegal” practice of tuning in to the police radio and trying to get to a crime scene faster than the police themselves.
Cheah came to Hong Kong to further pursue his career as a newsman when he was 20 — using the cheapest transportation mode, a cargo ship. When he landed in Yau Ma Tei, his plan was nothing grandeur than to earn enough money to return to Malaysia and buy a home.
Armed with just a secondary school certificate, he taught himself accounting skills, plus other solid finance knowledge that he thought could rival that of a finance professional.
He was the first reporter to break the news that the Hong Kong dollar has been pegged to the US dollar in 1983. After 17 years as a journalist, he rose through the ranks to become financial editor for The Asian Wall Street Journal in 1983.
Cheah calls himself a lifelong learner. “My grandparents were from Fujian province in China and their culture was much well-founded. For myself, I’m all the time fighting with knowledge, my mission is: Never stop learning, and put knowledge to use.”
Valuing investing has been etched in his company’ name from Day 1.
As revealed in his book, Living Value Investing: The Story of Cheah Cheng Hye, when Cheah called it quits in his journalism career and joined Morgan Grenfell, a British investment bank, as head of equities research in the late 1980s, it was a very dull period in Hong Kong’s asset management sector, with asset managers used to taking two-hour lunch breaks and buying the same blue chips to stay with the Hang Seng Index.
Cheah led his team in scouring undervalued second and third-liners that investors paid little heed to. When he was authorized to trade in a small amount of proprietary capital, he grew the pool into a sizable amount before he started his own brand.
Though value investing is not favored by the market all the time, out of seven of 25 years, his Classic Fund had been in the red. And, for the “short-term” business, as Cheah jokingly puts it, where “your clients might make angry calls if you underperform for two weeks”, he believes in holding the fund’s value until it get rerated rather than chasing the momentum. This has remained unchanged.
Despite his hard won fortune, Cheah chooses to stay humble. He says he still feels strange when he sees people not finishing their food on the plate and, in the book, it’s revealed that he will only buy suits when there’re discounts. “I’m not programmed to anything above middle class,” said Cheah.
“You’ll meet many people in life, especially in the financial world who can always talk eloquently because they had gone to the right colleges. Those are people who talk the talk, but we walk the walk.”