Hedge Fund Alpha Interview
I was profiled by Hedge Fund Alpha in the lead up to the Sohn HK Conference. You can read the interview at their website (link) or below:
The 2025 Sohn Hong Kong Conference is coming up on May 30 at the Asia Society. In anticipation of the event, Hedge Fund Alpha is bringing you full-length features of some of the presenting managers.
Graham Rhodes, founder and chief investment officer of Longriver Investment Partners, will be presenting as part of the Next Wave portion of the 2025 Sohn Hong Kong Conference. Longriver Investment Partners is a global value investing firm Rhodes founded in Hong Kong in 2022.
Graham Rhodes at the 2025 Sohn Hong Kong Conference
This is his first time presenting at the Sohn conference, and he’s excited to be part of one of the premier events for the Asian investment community, which he said draws “some of the brightest minds in the field.”
“More importantly, it supports the Karen Leung Foundation’s mission to raise awareness and funding for the prevention and treatment of gynecological cancers — a cause that hits close to home for me,” Rhodes said. “My wife was diagnosed with pre-cancerous growths from HPV and had part of her cervix removed. When we later tried to have children, we weren’t sure if she would be able to carry to full term. Thankfully, she could, and we’re now proud parents to two wonderful boys.”
Rhodes and his wife share their story to help reduce the stigma around gynecological cancers while encouraging early screening and advocating for HPV vaccination, which his wife wasn’t offered as a girl, partially because it was taboo at the time.
“Even as an adult, she was afraid to ask for advice because of the stigma,” Rhodes added. “So yes, I’m honored to support the foundation and excited to present for the first time at Sohn this year.”
Background on Graham Rhodes
Before founding Longriver, Rhodes served as head of research at Capital for Business Limited, a family office. He advised the principal and managed a portfolio of global equities and bonds.
Rhodes was born and raised in Hong Kong, spending his teens and early 20s traveling between there and New Zealand, where he studied. Following a stint in investment banking, which enabled him to save for graduate school, he attended Oxford University before returning to Hong Kong to work in public equities. Rhodes said he was “drawn as much by the excitement of China’s growing economy as by the desire to come home.”
“Longriver’s tagline — “Global Value Investing, from Asia” — reflects this journey,” he added. “I began with Chinese equities, then expanded to regional and eventually global coverage. Asia is the beating heart of the global economy, but its companies operate in an international context, competing globally, running on the Western tech stack and within the Western financial system. It’s a fertile hunting ground if you love pulling on threads, like I do.”
On why he loves investing
Rhodes loves investing because he enjoys studying businesses and because investing allows him to place a few high-conviction bets on the side. For example, he spent lots of time researching the Japanese conglomerate Hikari Tsushin, which had a stellar track record but opaque disclosures.
“I needed to understand ‘why?’ and ‘how?’ as much as ‘what?’” Rhodes explained. “Unpacking the founder’s motivations felt like cracking a code. That research gave me the conviction to buy when the market panicked last August.”
He also enjoys the “paradox of investing,” which is how he thinks of the “intellectual sparring of debate, paired with the solitude of keeping your own counsel.”
“As a Eurasian in Hong Kong, I’ve often felt like an outsider, and this work allows me to harness that detachment productively,” Rhodes said. “Last but not least, it’s gratifying to help clients meet their financial goals.”
The winding path into asset management
While Rhodes always had an inkling of what he wanted to do, it took him some time to figure out what asset management was and how to get there. For example, he had initially thought investment bankers did investing.
“One of my luckiest breaks was when Amazon’s algorithm recommended Warren Buffett’s letters to me in 2014,” Rhodes said. “The scales fell from my eyes: here was a way to combine business and finance in a way that could reliably generate and compound wealth. And Buffett did so ethically.”
He felt lucky to be invited to join a family office where he could put those principles into practice. According to Rhodes, it’s “surprisingly rare” to find investors who seriously utilize Buffett’s teachings.
“My principal prioritized conservative investing and paid no heed at all to conventional money management orthodoxy,” Rhodes added. “He stressed that investing should be done within your circle of competence and always with a margin of safety. Portfolios should be constructed to withstand any kind of weather, and certainly not with a benchmark in mind. It was a formative experience.”
He founded his own hedge fund because he had done well at the family office but felt a little too comfortable. Rhodes launched Longriver with the support of his principal and his wife because he wanted to stretch himself and his abilities.
“I wouldn’t have done so unless I had a time-tested process and track record,” he added. “Even then, I’ve learned a lot since launching in 2023. The process continues to evolve, and I believe it’s stronger today than when I started.”
Strategy
Rhodes runs a concentrated global long-only fund, seeking companies he can understand with predictable cash flows and solid capital allocation. His objective is to invest in businesses that can reinvest his capital faster than the market. Rhodes believes that will drive long-term outperformance.
He works solo, always careful to maximize the return on his time, meaning unearthing investments he can hold for as long as possible.
“Otherwise, I’d just be spinning my wheels,” Rhodes explained. “I want simple businesses with clear competitive advantages, run by honest people who understand good capital allocation. Then I wait to buy them at a valuation which offers a margin of safety. On the other side of the coin, these ideas are rare, so I need to make them count, which lends itself to a concentrated portfolio.”
For the most part, he works alone because it’s simpler and cheaper — and because he hasn’t found the right partner yet. However, Rhodes doesn’t feel isolated, having built up a community of friends within the investing business, which is where he gets his sense of camaraderie and critical feedback.
First investment
He made his first serious investment as a teen, investing in the fund run by the principal of the family office where he would later work. Over many years, that investment blossomed into meaningful seed capital for his own investments.
A critical moment for Rhodes was when he invested in Google and Facebook in 2016. Before those investments, he had focused almost entirely on Asian investments.
“I was a bit parochial and hadn’t learned the importance of studying businesses in their global context… but I was put in charge of my then-firm’s investments in South Korea and discovered that the major internet portal there, Naver, was rapidly losing time market share to these new products called YouTube and Instagram,” Rhodes explained. “Curious, I looked at their parent companies’ financials and realized that these were vastly superior businesses trading at much more attractive valuations.”
That moment marked the time when he dove into the world of global investing. Alphabet and Meta Platforms have been “phenomenal investments” for Rhodes that really came to define the way he invests today.
Learning from mistakes
On the other hand, he’s learned a lot from his mistakes as well. One of Rhodes’ earliest mistakes was spending too much time and capital on a particular small cap in Hong Kong. He said the company’s historic numbers looked great, and its stock was cheap, so he thought it checked all of his boxes. However, as time went by, he realized that the company had bad corporate governance and capital allocation habits.
“I naively thought I could help them see the light, so I engaged in some gentle activism by writing letters to the board, speaking with management and asking subtly pointed questions at their [annual general meetings] (AGMs),” Rhodes explained. “Nothing changed, however. While it was ultimately a profitable investment, it was a fluke. The stock is now down some 90% from my initial purchase price.”
As a result of that experience, he now invests only where he believes time will be on his side. He targets managers and controlling shareholders who will allocate capital for the benefit of all shareholders — rather than just writing “blank checks to indulge their egos or their children’s whims.”
“While there are many good businesses in Asia, there aren’t too many corporate managers who know how to translate business success into good results for minority shareholders like me,” Rhodes added.
Advice to younger investors and managers
Over the years, he has met many bright students and younger people who want to become investors after succeeding conventionally, possibly due to its financial rewards and prestige. However, Rhodes noted that the business rewards the unconventional because it’s one of taking calculated risks.
“If you’re not comfortable being different or frequently wrong, this probably isn’t for you,” he advised younger would-be investors. “Nor are these qualities which can be learned in the classroom. So if I don’t see evidence of this, I generally try to steer people towards other, more suitable pursuits. “
As far as starting a fund, Rhodes shared advice from Anglo-Swiss investor Rob Vinall, who suggested that new managers maximize their survival by keeping their costs as low as possible. While he feels this should be obvious to value investors, he also thinks it bears repeating.
Inspired by two learning machines
Rhodes is inspired by a close friend who serves in the New Zealand Special Forces. They “swap notes” on books, politics and life. Although Rhodes’ friend is a warrior, he described him as “first and foremost a learning machine,” which he “practices with extreme humility.”
“He introduced me to the concept of moral courage,” he added. “Soldiers must be physically brave but must also have the strength to stand up for their principles and values, especially when under pressure. In his case, it was finding the moral courage to leave an unhealthy relationship. On all counts, I admire him deeply and have an enormous amount to learn from him.”
Within the investing universe, Rhodes named Chinese American investor Li Lu, the founder and chairman of Himalaya Capital who became famous for managing Charlie Munger’s family fortune when he was still a rising star in the area of investing.
“His writing on the progress of civilization, the ethics of managing other people’s money and the commitment to furthering knowledge, all form the bedrock of how I think about investing today,” Rhodes added.