1/13/2026
David Webb, Hong Kong’s Most Vocal Investor, Dies at 60
Bloomberg (01/13/26) Prasso, Sheridan; O. Bergman, Jonas
David Webb, Hong Kong’s most vocal investor whose investigations into corporate malfeasance triggered regulatory probes and made him a celebrity in the city’s financial industry, has died. He was 60. Webb passed away peacefully in Hong Kong on Jan. 13 from metastatic prostate cancer, according to a statement on his official X account. Diagnosed in 2020, he said in February that he might have only months more to live. A resident of Hong Kong since being transferred there by Barclays Plc in 1991, the British-born Webb made his name and fortune spotting investments in the city’s notoriously volatile small- and mid-cap market. He railed against the city’s monopolies and tycoon-dominated industries, even gaining a board seat at bourse operator Hong Kong Exchanges & Clearing Ltd. (HKXCY), where his dissection of operations meant meetings ran at least an hour longer than average, according to fellow director Oscar Wong. For his efforts to root out corruption and increase corporate transparency, Webb was honored in June as a Member of the Order of the British Empire. For a one-man show (he did have one assistant), Webb’s output was prodigious. Besides the management of his fast-growing portfolio, Webb helped champion corporate governance reforms and often called out public companies he believed were at fault. The most famous of these was a group of 50 Hong Kong firms he named the Enigma Network and advised investors “not to own” in 2017. This assortment of brokers, construction firms, an umbrella maker, and others shared common owners and business ties, and their share prices were artificially inflated as a result, Webb wrote. Six weeks after he alleged that the stocks were entwined in a complex web of cross-shareholdings that had pushed their valuations to unsustainable levels, 38 of them plunged suddenly, some by more than 90%. That triggered the largest-ever investigation by the Securities and Futures Commission, the city’s financial regulator, and several public company executives ended up being charged. Webb compared himself to an expert mechanic who walked around second-hand car lots looking at vehicles that had been discounted for risk of being lemons. By avoiding most of the lemons most of the time and “getting a substantial discount on good companies, I have been able to outperform,” he said in a 2018 speech at The University of Hong Kong. Parlaying his savings from his time in corporate finance, Webb began trading full time at the age of 33, amassing a fortune of at least $170 million by 2019, according to an analysis by Bloomberg. With few analysts covering Hong Kong’s mid- and small-cap market, Webb often worked until 2 a.m. pouring over company announcements and press reports. He filled giant filing cabinets in his Mid-Levels home office with clippings before eventually going digital. He favored large stakes in small undervalued companies where he would be noticed and could agitate for change. “If you are going to be a minority shareholder, it’s better to be a big one,” he said when discussing his strategy. He didn’t use leverage or short stocks to make money off declines. Early on he started webb-site.com as a forum for his views on regulation, corporate developments, and other market news. It featured the Latin phrase “scientia potentia est,” meaning “knowledge is power.” Despite a layout that never changed since the dial-up age, the ad-free site and its extensive database of information on Hong Kong companies, organizations and individuals became required reading in Hong Kong investing circles. As his reputation grew, so did the site’s impact. When in October 2016 he posted a demand that hotel amenities maker Ming Fai International Holdings (3828) pay a special dividend from a property sale, the shares jumped around 7% within minutes. Later at a shareholder meeting, the firm’s mom-and-pop investors stood to shake his hand and thank him for intervening. In October 2018, his research on companies linked to China Huarong Asset Management Co. (2799), a scandal-plagued bad-loan manager, sent several stocks tumbling by about 10%. In mid-November that year, he triggered a $228 million selloff after highlighting shares at risk of trading suspensions because of what he called a misguided Hong Kong Stock Exchange proposal to change its listing rules. His reports on companies to avoid were a byproduct of his stock-picking process. “I am looking for good companies, but when you do that, you find an awful lot of rubbish,” he said. “Things like the Enigma Network pop out.” In hopes that his website would live on without him, Webb said he tried handing it over to the University of Hong Kong along with offers of substantial donations to support it, only to be turned down. Maintaining a repository of data about companies and powerful individuals had become more perilous as Hong Kong’s government moved to restrict public access to such information. The website servers were shut down on Oct. 31, though he continued to write on Substack. Webb’s last post was on Dec. 15. David Michael Webb was born on Aug. 29, 1965. Attending school in Yorkshire, he encountered his first computer — a teletype terminal that printed results on a roll of paper — at around age 14 when the parent-teacher association acquired one second-hand, he recalled in a 2007 interview with the South China Morning Post. A self-confessed computer geek, he wrote books on coding as a teenager as well as a number of games for early 8-bit home computers such as the Sinclair Spectrum and Commodore 64. He graduated in mathematics from Exeter College, Oxford University, and designed his own code to scrape government and stock exchange websites for data, which was then uploaded on his site as a valuable tool for researchers. He spent 12 years as an investment banker, the first five in London before moving to Hong Kong. According to his website, he was a corporate finance director of BZW Asia Ltd., an arm of Barclays (BCS), until 1994, when he became in-house adviser to the Wheelock group of Hong Kong companies. He retired in 1998 to run his website and research the Hong Kong market. A member and past chairman of Hong Kong’s chapter of Mensa, the society for people with exceptionally high IQs, Webb could recall from memory the city’s listing codes and securities regulations. In his first interview with Bloomberg Businessweek in 2000, Webb said he had previously been a habitual writer of newspaper letters to the editor, but with the advent of the internet, he discovered he could launch his own website and speak to the public directly with an aim to “stop the rot in corporate governance.” Webb had his fair share of detractors. He was quick to dismiss the viewpoints of Hong Kong’s local brokerage community, Choi Chen Po-sum, a vice chairman of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in the 1990s, told Bloomberg in 2019. An ultimately successful campaign to end stock trading-fee minimums in the mid-2000s spurred some in the local press to label him an agent of foreign hedge funds, an allegation he laughed off. For decades a mainstay in the city’s financial press, Webb found a new audience in 2014, during the so-called Umbrella Movement. In front of thousands of pro-democracy protesters, he took to the stage to call for reform of the city’s electoral system. “Don’t worry about the small economic impact of these protests,” he told the crowd blocking a major highway in front of the city’s legislative building, according to a copy of the speech on his website. “Think about the large economic benefits of a more dynamic economy, ending collusion between the government and the tycoons who currently elect the chief executive,” he said. “When 70 old tycoons visit Beijing for instructions, you just know something is wrong. It should be the Great Hall of the People, not the Great Hall of the Tycoons,” he said. He continued to champion political reform in the years after the Umbrella Movement and was often stopped in the street by well-wishers. His efforts also attracted scorn from some in the financial community who saw the city’s various protest movements as annoyances and misguided. Some financiers even alleged Webb was an agent of America’s intelligence agencies, a claim Webb said was nonsense and emblematic of the gossiping that Hong Kong delighted in. Strangers were sometimes spotted rummaging in his apartment building’s trash bins, presumably looking for dirt on him, he said. He criticized the city’s “draconian” isolation during the Covid pandemic as well as the growing crackdown on civil liberties in the city. Webb said it wasn’t enough to just have wealth. One should contribute to society with expertise, similar to a pro-bono lawyer, or by running for political office, he said. “I don’t want to reach the end of my life and say I was a really good investor,” he said. “That was fun, but I didn’t advance the human condition.”
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