Danyang Zhao 赵丹阳

If you never heard of Danyang Zhao before and you are interested in investing in China, I would suggest you to do some homework. He is called Godfather of private equity in china 中国私募教父.

The private equity world was completely underground in china sometime ago. But a few years later (too lazy to check when) some star managers were recruited by public financial institutions to start mutual funds or hedge funds. Therefore had the name of sunshine private equity 阳光私募. His funds did really well, and was at least once named the best performing fund by Bloomberg.

But he really made headline in China at the beginning of 2008 by shut down of his china mutual funds. http://focus.jrj.com.cn/ygsmdyr.html has some good information on this topic in Chinese. He was obviously learning from the closure of the partnerships of WB in the late 1960s. although he missed more profits from the chinese stock bubble later, he avoided the crash followed it as well.

(But he kept his hk hedge fund open. Even after the mkt downturn and everything else, his hk fund still had Accumulated Weighted-Return (with dividend reinvested in the fund) Since Inception of over 420% since inception in 01/2003. Note 2003 was a sort of bottom of Chinese stock mkt.)

He later again made an international headline by winning the bid to pay over US$2m to have lunch with WB. I recall Mr. Duan who won the bid previous year was also a Chinese. I followed that person for a while and went back to NTES and made a little bit money. I think Duan paid less than $1m. wonder how much will the next winner pay to win the bid.