The Team

Chauwei Yak is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of GAO Capital. She is responsible for managing the business and affairs of GAO as well as being part of the Risk Management committee. She also oversees the day-to-day activities of the business, having direct reports from the heads of finance/accounting, operations, technology and legal/compliance. 

She has almost 20 years of investment experience and was previously Director of Research for Ortelius Capital in New York, where she was in charge of hedge fund selection and built the company’s portfolio allocation and risk monitoring system. Prior to that, she was in investment banking at J.P. Morgan and UBS, in New York and Tokyo. She is a Chartered Valuer and Appraiser (CVA) and Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst (CAIA), as well as a committee member of the Singapore Institute of Directors (SID). 

Chauwei graduated summa cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania with a dual degree, B.S. in Economics with Finance concentration from the Wharton School and B. A. in Asian & Middle Eastern Studies from the College of Arts & Sciences. She also received a minor in Mathematics. She speaks regularly at conferences by EQDerivatives, HFM and CNBC, as well as being featured on publications including Bloomberg and Business Times. Chauwei has also lectured at the Business Families Institute of Singapore Management University and shares her thoughts regularly on www.linkedin.com/in/chauwei and https://thechauwei.blogspot.com/

Yongjie Yi is the Chief Risk Officer at GAO Capital and he is in charge of portfolio allocation for our multi-manager multi-strategy funds. His responsibilities include optimisation of trading operations, research and due diligence of relative value, macro and systematic strategies, implementation of hedging strategies as well as risk management. 

Prior to joining the firm, he was a portfolio manager at a hedge fund in Singapore trading Nikkei and Topix futures and options. Before this, he was a trader at JPMorgan in Tokyo, where he traded fixed income exotics. 

Yongjie graduated with a Bachelor degree (First Class Honours) in Electrical & Electrical Engineering from Imperial College of Science & Technology, and Master in Financial Engineering from Cornell University, New York. He is fluent in English, Chinese and Japanese. 

Kenneth Yap is the Portfolio Manager of the ASV Fund, GAO's flagship long-only equity fund with an Asia focus. He has over 20 years of experience in equity markets, of which 17 years were spent in Southeast Asia. Achieving an annualised return of over 30% since inception, the ASV Fund was recently named the best Asia ex Japan fund in HFM Asian Performance Awards 2022. 

Kenneth was formerly the fund manager of the KAF Asia Equities Fund from 2013-19. During that time, the fund performed spectacularly well by beating the benchmark by over 50%. Prior to that, Kenneth was also former Head of Equity Sales at Macquarie Capital Securities in Jakarta, and Senior Equity Analyst at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, London. Kenneth was also formerly a Qualified Associate Chartered Accountant, ICAEW with Deloitte & Touche, London.

Kenneth graduated with a B.A in Economics and Management from the University of Oxford and was the recipient of the British High Commissioners' Chevening Award. 

Terry Lim has over 25 years of experience in GIC leading various middle & back office functions. 

Previously, he was head of Investment Book of Records (IBOR) & Portfolio Rebalancing Operations, as well as head of Performance Management, Management Reporting and head of Global Markets Risk Analysis. 

Terry graduated with a Bachelor of Applied Science in Computer Engineering at Nanyang Technological University.

Priya maintains an inclusive work environment at GAO where everyone has a voice and the opportunity to share their diverse opinions and variant views. She also spearheads our ESG efforts to integrate sustainability into the firm's strategy.

Priya was previously the Executive Director of a publicly listed recreational activities company. She was in charge of the operations pertaining to food and beverages and human resources departments of the company, and also actively involved with the Corporate Social Responsibility related initiatives of the firm.

Priya holds a post graduate degree in public health from University of Melbourne, Australia. She is also a trained and certified NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) Life Coach.