Interview #108 : Alex Feng (Rome Capital)
Compounders and special situations
For this issue we have the pleasure of interviewing Alex Feng from Rome Capital.
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Hi Alex, thanks so much for taking the time out to do this interview.
Can you please tell readers about your background, and how you got involved in investing?
Thanks, Jon, I appreciate it. I’m Alex Feng from Rome Capital. My journey into investing started during my master’s in finance at Peking University, where I took a value investing course taught by Professor Jeffrey Towson, a Columbia alum.
The concept of ‘buying a dollar for 50 cents’ immediately made sense to me. As people say, ‘you either become a value investor in five minutes, or you never do’—and for me, it clicked instantly.
From there, I started analyzing stocks in the Chinese market and investing on my own, which eventually led to an internship at First Manhattan’s China-focused fund, First Beijing.
I stayed there for nine years as an analyst, gaining valuable experience at one of the earliest value investing firms in the China, focusing on Hong Kong and US-listed Chinese stocks. During that time, I also earned my MBA at Columbia and completed the Value Investing Program. Then, in early 2024, I teamed up with my classmate Jason to launch Rome Capital.
You’ve studied finance and investing in both the US and China. Are there any major differences to how finance and investing are taught in these respective countries?
The differences were striking. A decade ago, value investing was just being introduced to China’s universities. I was in the very first class of Prof. Towson’s at PKU. In contrast, Columbia’s Value Investing Program was highly structured, covering everything from compounders and special situations to distressed investments and capital allocation.