Wait until it matures: star fund manager
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Park In-hee, a senior fund manager at Shinyoung Asset Management
By Kim Jae-won
The dream of all individual investors is to gain as much profits as possible. To make their dream come true, they often buy big chip stock, and sell them when their prices go up 10 percent, or 20 percent.
However, Park In-hee, a senior fund manager at Shinyoung Asset Management, said that the fastest way to gain big profits is to be patient and wait.
“I recommend investors wait for a long time after buying undervalued chips, if they want to hit the jackpot. To hit a homerun is more important than a few singles,” said Park in an interview with The Korea Times.
Park was chosen as the best fund manager by a local newspaper last year, marking a 54.54 percent profitability rate, compared to the benchmark KOSPI. She has been in charge of Shinyoung Value High Dividend Fund for 12 years since 2003, whose assets under her management have reached 3.3 trillion won ($3 billion), the biggest among local asset management funds.
Asked what her biggest home run was, the 15-year career fund manager picked Hansae Fashion Worldwide, a local knitted wears exporter. Park said the company was a medium-sized company with a 30 billion won market capitalization when she first invested in it three years ago, but its value increased five times since then.
“Hansae was going through a transitional period at the time, struggling to leap forward as a leading player. I was sure that it would hit the jackpot, if some conditions matured, and finally it started to break the wall.”
Park’s second homerun was AmorePacific, an expensive chip in the Korean stock market. The Seoul-based cosmetics company saw its market value increase 2.5 times to 14.7 trillion won on Wednesday from a year ago thanks to its booming Chinese business.
The fund manager said that she decided to invest in AmorePacific a few years ago because she recognized the company’s decade-long effort to raise its brand awareness in the Chinese market. In the first quarter of 2014, the cosmetic company responded with huge profits, posting 1.2 billion won of net income, up more than 300 percent from the previous quarter.
“I learned from AmorePacific that only a prepared company can win. There are many cosmetic companies in Korea, but no one benefited from the Chinese market as much as AmorePacific.”
The fund manager, who studied English literature at college, said that studying liberal arts helped her succeed in business, giving her a wider perspective of the market.
“I appreciate that I learned literature rather than economics because a fund manager job requires a wide range of perspectives to see the world and the market. A good performance is beyond a chart.”