Family office for Hong Kong’s richest builds out hedge fund team

[HONG KONG] A money manager for some of Hong Kong’s richest families is building a hedge fund team to allocate money away from private equity after its clients asked for more liquid investments.

VMS Group, which has about US$4 billion in assets under management, hired equities veteran Raymond Jook as managing director in April. The team added Kyle Wong and Carmen Tang to form a three-person group that will invest in public markets and build hedge fund strategies over time, managing partner Elton Cheung said.

The hires are part of a strategic pivot for the multi-family office that’s also making a foray into crypto. The firm has largely focused on private equity and other longer-duration strategies since it was founded two decades ago. The investment firm is affiliated with the billionaire Cheng dynasty that controls New World Development, according to sources familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified discussing private information.

“Most people identify us as a private equity and primary market specialist,” Cheung said. “But we have been hearing from clients moaning about the lack of liquidity, so we want to add on new strategies which are much more liquid, like monthly redemption,” he said.

VMS declined to comment on a relationship with the Cheng family, saying it does not disclose the identity of its investors.

The team plans to build a track record in equities before potentially launching a new equity long/short hedge fund for external investors around year-end, with an initial fund-raising target of more than US$100 million, Cheung said.

Ultimately, VMS’s ambition is to build a platform with multiple strategies such as macro, credit, event-driven and quant, Cheung said.

Family offices are trimming private equity after years of increases, while boosting allocations to hedge funds to navigate macroeconomic uncertainty, according to a UBS Group report. Another investment firm, Andon Hong Kong, is opening an office in New York to deepen its push into hedge funds, Bloomberg previously reported.

Jook joined from BOCHK Asset Management, where he was head of equities. Before that, he was managing director and chief investment officer at Avant Capital Management (HK), overseeing investment strategies and operations. He also held roles at UBS earlier in his career.

Wong was director of financial markets at Kaplan, an education company, for more than a decade, according to his LinkedIn profile. Tang worked for Goldman Sachs earlier in her career.

The family office helps manage money for several of the city’s billionaire families and runs funds that invest in various sectors, including Internet technology and pharmaceuticals. In 2023, it teamed up with a former executive from Chinese artificial-intelligence (AI) company SenseTime Group to look for early-stage investments in AI. BLOOMBERG