Our Firm

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Dao Capital Advisors provides timely, actionable, accountable investment and risk management services to Chief Investment Officers (CIOs) of sophisticated institutions (pensions, endowment, foundations, family offices, hedge funds and asset managers).  We help firms navigate evolving markets while exploiting structural market weaknesses. We provide proactive asset allocation, preemptive risk management, as well as innovative alpha/hedging overlay strategies. Our clients are some of the most sophisticated investors, managing billions of assets. 

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Our Outsourced Chief Risk Officer (OCRO) service serves as an extension of your risk staff, providing a suite of cutting edge risk management systems, frameworks and techniques, previously available only to the most sophisticated institutions.

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Our PTM (Performance Turnaround Management) service provides a 360-degree portfolio review and diagnosis with actionable advice. No fees are charged if performance is not improved within a year.

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Our research reports serve institutional investors of all kinds, providing market insights, forward-looking opportunities and risks, and just-in-time investment recommendations.

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Our Philosophy

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Daoism is an ancient Chinese philosophy which states that effortless action leads to harmony and actions against the laws of nature lead to unintended consequences. It argues for reduced government intervention and letting natural economic forces play out (i.e. invisible hands). Daoism is a belief in natural cycles in life and in economic and social affairs.  

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We named our firm Dao Capital Advisors for a simple reason - we are firm believers in free capitalism, which unfortunately rarely exists today.  Being Doists in capital management, we believe in the following: 

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• “Effortless” active management: We don’t believe that constant capital allocation decisions will lead to desired outcome, but rather, we patiently wait for investment and hedging opportunities to emerge and design strategies to capitalize on them. 

• No periods are abnormal just like booms and bust cycles are natural sequences of capital market. We believe that the cause and effects reaction mechanism always repeats themselves between economy, capital markets and central banks/government. 

• Rather than having views, forecasts and predictions, we make assessment of the probability distribution of path-dependent capital market evolution. 

• We don’t pontificate the right or wrong and we are neither bulls nor bears, as we simply want to be in-syn (in harmony) with markets.  We don’t engage in academic and intellectual discussions on what should have happened and what the right government policies should be, but rather, we try to assess what are likely to occur and what the likely capital market implications are. 

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Read more about our investment philosophy.

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Our Leadership

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Jim Wang

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Jim is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Dao Capital Advisors LLC.  Jim has decades of research and investment experience spanning across pension funds, hedge funds, and investment consulting. Prior to co-founding DCA, Jim was a macro portfolio manager with Fore Research & Management, a multi-billion hedge fund, trading across global asset classes including rates, equities, commodities and currencies. In addition, he advised the CIO on the strategic positioning of the fund and hedging strategies. Prior to Fore, Jim oversaw USD 10 billion of retirement assets for Novartis US employees, invested across traditional and alternative asset classes.  At Novartis, Jim successfully navigated the fund through the financial crisis while very materially outperforming the policy benchmark.  Earlier in his investment career, Jim worked at HBK capital management, a multi-strategy hedge fund, and Morningstar Inc. Jim has an MBA from the University of Maryland’s Smith School of Business. He is a CFA charter holder and holds both FRM and CAIA designation.

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Christopher Xu

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Chris is the co-founder and president of of Dao Capital Advisors LLC. Prior to co-founding DCA, Chris spent more than a decade as the Chief Investment Officer of a multi-billion family office, where he managed investments across all major asset classes.  Simultaneously, he managed a successful global macro portfolio using a combination of systematic and discretionary approaches.  Earlier in his career, he worked at Bridgewater Associates as a portfolio strategist, at Sempra Commodities (now part of JP Morgan) as a statistical arbitrage trader, and at Lehman Brothers as an equity derivatives research analyst.  Chris double majored in Economics and Computer Science from the University of Chicago, and is a CFA Charterholder.