St Edward's Chronicle April 2018

31 ST EDWARD’S CHRONICLE

and James Schofield

What was the response? It was absolutely extraordinary. Within days of sending out our report by email, a partner at Goldman Sachs had been in touch to ask us to a breakfast meeting; someone from Morgan Stanley’s US office asked for more information; the CEO of Axa Investment Managers got in touch; and the CEO of an $8 billion hedge fund invited us for a meeting with his CIO. An associate with a Master’s degree in finance from Columbia University and a job at PIMCO, the biggest fixed income firm in the world ($1.6 trillion in Assets Under Management), sent us his CV and asked if he could work for us! We were absolutely blown away. What happened next? Shortly afterwards, we were at dinner one night with John’s father, updating him on our progress, and he suddenly said, ‘OK – how much do you want?’. We were surprised but delighted – Mr De Pauw’s significant investment launched our fund, and it has grown exponentially since then. From there a family office has decided to give us capital, as

have some other high net worth individuals. We have all now invested our own funds and are actively pre-raising capital for after our exams. Come June, what are your plans? We intend to rent an office in London and fill it with Bloomberg Terminals. We now have a website, www.heijincapital.com, and we’re taking enquiries. Meanwhile, alongside exam preparation, we’re all working on our Series 65 Investment Advisory Licence so that we are ready to start trading and managing funds later this year. Our core audience will be individual investors and our website is helping us to build our investment research client base already. We are also working on the launch of a Heijin Venture called Fuse Asset Solutions to provide any investor with a database of all hedge funds in one place. Finn Leighton is the Founder & CEO of this venture and will start allocating the $150k we have pre-raised as well as meeting with private equity firms to look for more significant investments.