Sunny Li and Jerry Weng are members of a very exclusive club. Their firm, Pinpoint Asset Management, is one of only 10 mainland Chinese-owned hedge funds among the 9,431 covered by research company Eurekahedge. That makes them unusual - and valuable.
'We are being contacted on almost a daily basis by overseas institutional investors,' says Mr Li, a Georgetown MBA graduate with four years' experience in London and New York as an emerging-markets hedge fund manager at Dresdner Kleinwort Benson.
Mainland hedge funds are scarce - and hence popular - because they are not supposed to exist yet.
The practice of short selling - selling borrowed shares on the expectation their price will fall and they can be bought back later for a profit - which is the bread and butter of hedge funds in other markets, is not allowed in China. The tools to do it do not even exist.
'Hedge funds should be able to short stocks but we can't legally short in the Chinese A-share market,' says Mr Weng, who has worked in Shanghai brokerages since the inception of China's stock markets 15 years ago. 'So we short in Hong Kong and use other overseas assets.'
Although their Shanghai-based fund is owned and operated by mainlanders, all of their US$50 million under management comes from the offshore assets of 'high net-worth individuals' - 60 per cent of whom live in China, with the rest in the United States, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Australia.