They were the last big investor, the last hope, and the last chance to keep the dream alive. I was running out of time. The partners had given me a few years to work things out, but I was a loss-making venture; I was running on borrowed time. I had known it would be hard taking over from John, but I had never contemplated failure before. Not really. Now it was staring me in the face. And I was calm.
I was calm, because I knew I was right. I had seen this story play out before, and my strategy was ideally placed. The problem was how to get other people to see that. So, I sat in the meeting room, running over the ideas in my head, waiting for the investor to come.
It’s a strange feeling to meet, for the first time, someone who has complete power over whether you fail or succeed. I was already perceived as a failure. I knew that. A big ex-client had recently told me so at a conference: “Why do you keep going?” he said. “You know your fund is a dead product, right?”
I could see where he was coming from. Assets had collapsed, and we had lagged the market badly in the rally back from the 2008 crisis. Changing managers added to the problems. Even though I had worked for the same firm and I had the same style, clients told us that changing managers meant everything was reset. We were back to zero. The optics were poor. A USD 5bn fund was now just USD 100m. It was barely breakeven, and here I was meeting the last big client. A client that held over 60% of the assets in the fund. A client I had never met before.
We were meeting in New York. The client was one of the biggest funds of fund investors in the world. I was expecting to meet one of those clients who had already made up their mind. This meeting was, surely, just to deliver the bad news. Soon I would be unemployed, and thinking of some way to make it back from the abyss. The average life span of a hedge fund manager back then was only about 4 years, so I would be bowing out bang on average. As I day-dreamed about my idle future, the client walked in. To my surprise, he seemed like a “nice guy”. Generally speaking, in finance, nice guys are rare, but he seemed like a nice guy to me. Anyway, he asked me what I was doing, and why I was doing it. And so I told him: China was following the road map of Asia in the late 1990s and consequently was heading for a currency crisis. This made me want to be positioned for deflation – long bonds and short equities – particularly those dependent on China, which at the time was most of the market. For me, this was the easy part. I had been in HK for the Asian Financial Crisis, and my thesis at university was on currencies. I was convinced I was right, even as the market was going against me.
After I talked, the client thought for a few minutes. At last, he spoke: “My team is telling me we should redeem from you and move on, that we should stick with bigger, better older managers.” He paused. “But I think you are smart. If we don’t give younger managers a chance, then what do we do in the future?”
I waited. Not sure where this was going.
“I tell you what I am going to do,” he continued. “I am going to redeem a small amount, but I want you to keep doing what you think is right.”
And that saved me. Right there and right then. That client’s willingness to give me a little longer. That saved me. It didn’t turn things around, but it kept me in the fight. And that fight led, ultimately, to the biggest turnaround story in hedge fund history.
This is my story. I want to share it with you. And along the way, I want to share with you some investing rules I use, and how I discovered them.
Chapter 1
Consensus Often Signals Risk, Not Safety
I did not grow up in a place that produces hedge fund managers. That was a huge hinderance to start with, but once I made it, it has been a huge advantage.
Canberra, in the 1970s and early 80s, was not a financial centre, not an industrial hub, not even especially ambitious. It was a purpose-built capital city dropped into the middle of the Australian bush — a town of public servants, tidy lawns, wide roads, and a sense that the rest of the world happened somewhere else. If you follow the logic of how success is “supposed” to work, nothing about my upbringing pointed toward global markets.
But that was the gift.
Canberra was isolated, but it was still connected. That’s the distinction. The state schools in Canberra were unusually good ones. My classmates weren’t drawn from one tribe. They came from everywhere. Children of diplomats. Refugees from Vietnam and Cambodia. Kids from government housing. Children of academics, activists, small business owners, truck drivers. It was an unusual mix for such a small city.
As a child, I didn’t think of this as diversity. I just thought it was normal. It was only later when I realised that these early experiences had taught me one of the most important lessons of my life. What looks “normal” depends entirely on where you are standing.
One of my primary school friends, Huy, had arrived in Australia as a refugee from Vietnam. He once wrote a school story about the sound of grenades exploding around him when he was three or four years old. At the time, he was just another kid in class. We chased each other around. We did homework. But his “normal” and my “normal” had nothing in common.
Another close friend, Piseth, was from a Cambodian family. His parents were elegant, calm, self-contained. They carried a quiet dignity that, as a kid, I couldn’t explain but instinctively noticed. Their lives before Australia had been nothing like ours.
Growing up around people whose experiences were fundamentally different from mine did something subtle but permanent. When I later encountered ideas, cultures, or market views that didn’t match my own, my instinct was not to reject them, but to dig a little deeper. Why does this make sense to them? That question — more than any economics textbook — shaped how I look at markets.
At home, there was another influence running in parallel. Sunday lunches were not quiet affairs. My father cooked, but politics did most of the talking. My mother worked in Parliament House, researching and writing briefings that ministers would later deliver as their own. She was one of the early women in that role. She understood, in practical terms, how decisions were made.
Dinner-table conversations weren’t about slogans. They were about motives.
Why would a politician take that position?
Who benefits?
Who loses?
What is the long-term aim?
I learned early that outcomes were rarely the product of simple logic. They were the result of incentives, pressures, trade-offs and personalities. People didn’t act because something was “correct.” They acted because it served their interests, solved a problem, or bought time.
Later, in markets, this translated directly. Prices did not move because spreadsheets said they should. They moved because of flows, positioning, policy, fear, career risk, and crowd behaviour.
But I didn’t know that yet. As a kid, I was just absorbing a worldview in which the surface story was never the full story.
Canberra itself reinforced the lesson. It was a capital city with barely 200,000 people in 1980s. At the time, it only had one nightclub, which as a teenager I was shocked to discover my parents had been to. Endless open space. Kangaroos on the outskirts. You could walk or cycle almost anywhere. It felt remote from the “important” parts of the world.
And yet, because it was the capital, embassies and international institutions were there. You could be in a small suburban classroom and sitting next to someone whose parents were negotiating trade agreements or had fled a war zone.
This combination — isolation and global exposure — was powerful. It meant I grew up slightly outside every centre of gravity. Not rural. Not metropolitan. Not elite. Not disadvantaged. Just… adjacent.
That “adjacent” position matters. When you’re fully inside a system, its assumptions become invisible. When you’re fully outside, you lack the tools to engage. Being adjacent lets you see both the system and the gaps in it.
In markets, that’s where edge lives.
As a child, I didn’t think of myself as contrarian. I just noticed that different people believed different things with equal conviction, and that reality somehow held all of them at once. What one group saw as obvious, another group saw as nonsense.
Years later, when I would hear phrases like “the market consensus,” I always felt a quiet resistance. Consensus sounded comforting, but it also sounded fragile. It reminded me of being in a room where everyone shares the same background and reaches the same conclusion — not because it is true, but because no one in the room sees the missing piece.
In school, in Canberra, I had seen too many missing pieces.
This is the foundation of my first investing rule. Consensus often signals risk, not safety.
Not because the crowd is stupid. Often the crowd is well informed. But crowds are shaped by shared experience, shared incentives, and shared blind spots. The more universal the agreement, the more likely it is that an assumption has gone unchallenged.
I learned to be comfortable slightly outside the group. Not aggressively opposed. Not rebellious for its own sake. Just willing to sit with the discomfort of holding a different view and asking, quietly; What if the people in this room are all seeing the same thing — and missing the same thing?
That question would later guide trades, positions, and career decisions. But it began long before finance.
It began in a small city at the edge of the world, where nothing was quite as simple as it first appeared.
