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By Benedicte Gravrand, Opalesque London:
Participants at the recent Opalesque Roundtable in Tokyo, Japan, agreed that there is an unfortunate language barrier - although that did not affect Japan funds' performance in any way.
Indeed, one of the biggest challenges for Japanese hedge fund managers when trying to attract foreign investors' money is the language barrier.
"In Japan, a typical prospective hedge fund manager would be someone in his mid 40s and
therefore, the time he (and its nearly always a he) became an investment professional, was when Japan was still experiencing its boom period," Rory Kennedy explained.
"At that time, young Japanese financial professionals didn't go overseas to learn English in the U.S. because they didn't need to, as Japan was large enough for a rewarding career."
This obviously does not help their image with investors - as all other Asian managers can speak English - which is a problem, as most of the investors who would invest $30m to $50m in start-ups are foreigners. Whereas the local institutional investors would not as they require a significant track-record and minimum AuM.
However performance has no correlation to the managers' ability to communicate to investors, in whatever language.
Those funds that have employed marketers on the basis of their language skills alone hav...................... To view our full article Click here
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