To The Moon

Richard Toh’s raw mea culpa details how he ignored Nvidia and bitcoin and misread tariffs

In early December, Richard Toh, the chief executive and investment officer for the Singapore-based hedge-fund firm Kenrich Partners, sent a four-page letter to investors. 

The news was bad. 

Kenrich’s Ocular Asia fund, which managed around $50 million, lost 7.9% in November. The bigger picture was worse—it had lost 35.4% so far in 2024. By comparison, its benchmark of Asian stocks outside of Japan was up 8.6% for the year. 

For a page and a half, Toh discussed tariffs, investments and missed opportunities while weaving in mentions of Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Taylor Swift. Then he got to the point. 

“I have come to the realization that I am not good at what I am doing but I guess some of you may have sensed that already,” he wrote. “I am sorry I have let you down.”

Hedge funds come and go, but few have done so with the kind of pathos and self-flagellation that Toh heaped upon his investors. (The letter was unsigned, but an employee at the fund confirmed Toh was the author. He declined, through this employee, to comment further.) 

“I pretty much missed all the major themes in the last two years,” Toh wrote. “I was hopelessly out of sync with the market, buying when I should be selling and selling when I should be buying. We got whipsawed several times this year even as we got some facts correct.”

Some investments in artificial intelligence and video-streaming companies did well in November. But he explained how Asian companies were caught off guard by President-elect Trump’s plans to place tariffs on imports from Mexico, where many of them assemble AI servers.

Then, he told a story about questioning one of his young software engineers’ personal holdings, and why he owned a single stock. 

“After consulting him for his reasons, which were not much, I told him that we did not invest in the US markets and that Nvidia NVDA -2.09%decrease; red down pointing triangle did not fit any of the criterion based on our value way of looking at companies,” Toh wrote. Shares of Nvidia—which makes graphic processing unit chips that are integral to AI software—rose over 180% so far in 2024, putting its market value above $3 trillion.

The software engineer’s only other holding? Bitcoin. In response, Toh started mining Ethereum, which hasn’t risen as stratospherically as the original cryptocurrency. 

“I learned from that episode that sometimes the best investments are precisely the ones you cannot explain and probably made no sense. It also told me I am getting too old,” he wrote.

Toh isn’t a well-known name in capital markets, but he has been in the investing business for nearly 40 years. According to an archived bio on his company’s website, he founded Kenrich in 1998 after working at Morgan Stanley Asset Management in Singapore.

It isn’t clear from the letter what dragged on the fund’s portfolio. The second-largest holding by the end of November was Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, which has roughly doubled so far in 2024. Its two other largest holdings were Naver, the South Korean owner of a search engine, and Sunny Optical Technology, a lens supplier for Chinese smartphones. Neither had fallen as much as the broader portfolio by the end of the month. 

Toh informed his investors that the fund was shutting down by the end of 2024. As of the end of November, about a third of its assets were already in cash.

It wasn’t clear if Kenrich as a whole was closing, or just the Ocular fund, which started in 2018. After distributing the remainder of the capital, Toh said he planned to take a year to rest and “change the way I look at things.”