From his window in the sail-shaped Blue Sky Tower, Dale Choi watches an army of workers paving roads and pouring concrete around Sukhbatar Square in the Mongolian capital of Ulan Bator.
The glass towers are a sign of fast money flooding into the country on the back of Mongolia's booming mining sector, but it is an old, Stalin-era building on the corner of the square that captures Choi's attention.
This is the Mongolian Stock Exchange, a small but growing bourse with huge potential for retail investors willing to make a bet on Mongolia.
Last year the MSE Top 20 index gained 136 per cent, defining Mongolia as among the world's best performing share markets. In the first two months of this year, the MSE Top 20 soared 120 per cent. It has since seen a big pullback, but the Top 20 is still up about 38 per cent for the year.
'This is the heart of capitalism and we want it to beat strongly,' says Choi, a University of California Los Angeles-educated economist working at one of Mongolia's nascent investment banks. 'Change is happening here every day. It's the frontier, and we're at it.'
Choi, a stout 25-year-old Mongolian with a scruffy goatee and moustache, is the chief investment strategist for Frontier Securities. He is one of many 'repat' Mongolians, returning home after several years abroad, to take advantage of opportunities in Ulan Bator, which he jokingly calls 'Ulan Qatar'.